One of the few medical experts whose word I trust, has firmly believed for a while we are in the latter stages of an epidemic.
I must emphasize that I am NOT a medical professional, I am just taking the word of one who is and has reliably proven in the past that she is a lot smarter than the average bear.
Basically there was a double spike in the flu season this year and a higher death toll than average. But this also means that a large segment of the population is already immune to Covid-19.
“The Oxford research suggests the pandemic is in a later stage than previously thought and estimates the virus has already infected at least millions of people worldwide. In the United Kingdom, which the study focuses on, half the population would have already been infected. If accurate, that would mean transmission began around mid-January and the vast majority of cases presented mild or no symptoms.
The head of the study, professor Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford theoretical epidemiologist, said she still supports the U.K.’s decision to shut down the country to suppress the virus even if her research winds up being proven correct. But she also doesn’t appear to be a big fan of the work done by the Imperial College team. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” she said.
If her work is accurate, that would likely mean a large swath of the population has built up resistance to the virus. Theoretically, then, social restrictions could ease sooner than anticipated. What needs to be done now, Gupta said, is a whole lot of antibody testing to figure out who may have contracted the virus.“
Regular readers of this blog will doubtless recall my bitching about a particularly nasty bug that has laid me up this winter. Okay, yes, it’s true that “I had me the Corona I can feels it,” hardly constitutes a proper diagnosis.
But it is possible to run up a simple blood drop test that will detect the presence of the antibody for Corvid-19. And the Brits seem to have done just that.
Mind you, I am not a journalist and therefore not an instant medical expert but I think we will shortly know if we have already hit peak plague and end the lock-down.
Perhaps in time to save The New Warriors.
Hey, I never said there wasn’t a downside to surviving the plague.
The Dark Herald 
I’m also thinking a lot of us had it before we knew anything nasty was going around. There was something that went through my house from the end of November to the beginning of January, that wasn’t like a normal cold or flu. Everyone got it, but got sick to varying degrees. I have other friends and family that seem to have caught whatever it was, and the symptoms ran from mild all the way to pneumonia.
LikeLike
My wife’s a nurse; and many of her forums and friends in the field have all been telling similar stories. They recall something going around in November/December, and several people were having flu like symptoms but not testing positive for flu. Besides, if we didn’t know the coronavirus was here, wouldn’t we just be thinking that this was a bad/long cold and flu season? But as Rahm Emmanuel said, “never let a crisis go to waste…”
LikeLike
“Italy has towns where 16 people would die in a year that are now seeing hundreds. “
LikeLike
“…now that we know for sure that it’s spreading and have tested people there have been massive spikes in deaths.”
Dude, read that sentence again. I am sure you aren’t trying to make the argument that there has been a spike in death because we have started testing for Corvid-19 but that is how it reads.
“Italy has towns where 16 people would die in a year that are now seeing hundreds”
Corvid-19 mostly kills people in their seventies and eighties.
If there are towns In Italy that only had sixteen deaths the year before and are having hundreds of deaths now, that means that either:
(a) Corvid-19 has mutated into a strain that kills regardless of age.
(b) There has been a massive influx of people in their seventies and eighties to these towns.
Or (c) these number are garbage.
Oh, and Italy was cooking the books for a while. If you got runover in the street and tested positive for Corvid-19, your death was listed as a Corona death. So your raw numbers may be problematic. I’m not saying you’re wrong but I will need to see your raw numbers.
Last and most important is antigenic drift. Corvid-19 could have gone through earlier this winter, remained unidentified and shifted into something more fatal when it was going through China.
LikeLike
We’re all just guessing until an antibody test can be administered to a large portion of the U.S. population and we know how many people made it safely to the other side of a Corona infection. Still a good idea to avoid other peeps until that test comes out.
Here’s hoping Glaxo, Merck, et al don’t decide a profitable mandatory vaccine is way more important to develop than a one-time test that doesn’t produce long-term cash flow. All the Republicans in my family refuse to believe in that kind of cynical outlook within corporations, let alone the likelihood that Congress can be bought off by Glaxo to make things like a Corona virus mandatory. Then again, my family members refused to believe we would outlaw criticism of that certain Middle Eastern country.
LikeLike