A few thoughts on this report that as of Friday "1,839 NYPD employees — 1,619 uniformed members and 220 civilian members — tested positive for the coronavirus, up 53.3 percent from Tuesday, according to the department" https://nypost.com/2020/04/03/two-more-members-of-nypd-die-from-coronavirus/ /1

Yes, that's a shockingly high number, even presuming police to be a high-risk group. At the same time, note that the number of NYPD officers is 36,000 (non-officer staff adds another 19,000). https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/about-nypd/about-nypd-landing.page /2

I am going to assume here that the program tested the great majority of these 36,000 as well as all or many non-uniformed staff and that all the results had come back by Friday (if either assumption is wrong, I hope someone will flag that for me.) /3

What that would imply is that the positive rate for a broad subgroup of working-age New Yorkers is between 3 and 5 percent. /4

My point here, as I hope will be clear in a moment, has little or nothing to do with police and the job they do. It would apply in much the same way were the sample taken from among teachers, bank clerks, utility workers, whatever. /5

The point is that a 3 to 5 percent infection prevalence would seem fatal to the speculative theory, popular lately in some quarters, that maybe infection rates are already super-high and the per-infection rate of hospitalization, death, etc. correspondingly low. /6

I never did find the "relax, we're all infected already & nearly all of us made it through fine" surmise very plausible. But if the NYPD numbers are anything like a full sampling, the city is nowhere near prevalent infection and nowhere near a glide path to herd immunity. /7, efn