I see the common argument of "well, we MUST have some immunity already within society, because if we didn't the numbers would be much worse" quite a bit here.
I don't think the evidence really bears that out... It fails to account for the fact that basically 90% of the country has drastically changed their behavior over the last 5 months.
- Most of those who can are WFH.
- Most of those who cannot WFH are either at their workplace while distancing / wearing masks, or are home unemployed.
- In much of the country, bars, indoor dining, movie theaters, even nail/hair salons, are closed.
- In most of the places where things are open, people are still trying to distance, wear masks, etc.
- Kids aren't in school congregating with each other. Many parents are still heavily limiting the interaction their kids have with others.
- Many families/friend groups are avoiding large family gatherings, parties, get-togethers, or are doing them FAR more infrequently than before.
- There are no concerts, no in-person sporting events, and in general large events which would cause significant spread have been curtailed.
Now, compare this to the counterexamples:
- In places where there were people in close proximity and limited capability for distancing (Diamond Princess cruise line, the various meat packing plants that had outbreaks, nursing homes before we learned our lessons), the thing ripped through like wildfire.
- There are many [admittedly anecdotal] cases we've posted here over the months. One was 16 friends who went to a bar for a birthday party and literally all of them got COVID, as did many others from the same bar that weekend. Another was a family who had a party and one asymptomatic carrier infected ~7 family members there who infected another 10 within the next few days, for 18 cases from one carrier at one event. I recall another "family party" superspreading incident we posted here but can't recall the details.
- Now that we start seeing people returning to "normal" in an arena where you simply can't wear masks or social distance, sports, you have things like 19 members of the Florida Marlins organization all getting it in rapid succession, and we're already seeing baseball games cancelled from more players turning up positive.
The idea that it's not spreading because we have latent immunity just doesn't hold water. The more likely scenario is that it's not spreading because we've all changed our behavior and kept R0 close enough to 1 that it's spreading slowly. The reason more of us haven't gotten it is that as far as confirmed cases are concerned, we're still at about 1.33% of the nation having had it. Of those 1.33%, most have either recovered or died, and those who know they're currently infected are self-quarantined, so there are few contagious people out in the wild right now.
So if you encounter a random 1000 people, how many are likely to have COVID? 5 (0.5%)? 10 (1%)? Lower? Either way, I know I haven't encountered 1000 people in the last month, and that includes any interactions I had going to/from Oregon a week ago and my various trips to Costco or other stores during that time.
In short, this is the equivalent of the argument I warned against early. The idea that if we did a good job keeping the death count down, people would use that as an argument that this was never very bad to start with. That argument has morphed into "we must have some level of latent immunity or the spread would be much worse, therefore this isn't as serious as we thought."
I understand both arguments--most of you here are optimists, and you sincerely want this to not be as bad as we all initially feared. But the easiest explanation for the lack of rampant spread is that we're actually doing a pretty decent job of controlling spread THROUGH OUR ACTIONS, and in the absence of those actions this thing would be a LOT worse.
