Ok. Here's a little insight into the life of an infectious disease epidemiologist trying to handle uncertainty and report responsibly. Warning - the coming thread will contain many "i'm not exactly sure" statements. Also shout out to @nataliexdean who made me notice this 1/n https://twitter.com/skarlamangla/status/1252327455609634817

so we've been waiting for good serology for like, forever. It's somehow amazingly still not here. What does that mean? well this antibody study is a serology study 2/n

it is suggesting that more than 4% have been exposed to the pandemic virus, but it remains somewhat hard to know what that means. Point 1 - are you sure that is SARS-CoV-2 or one of the milquetoast circulating betacoronas? 3/n

point 2 - I actually think it is plausible that it is. I think there's a quite enormous amount of undetected transmission and immunity but that is emphatically *not* the point 4/n

The point is what happens when the virus is given free reign. This has not happened in CA. We have seen it in places from italy to NYC as folks have scrambled to respond. There, it's s thing which will crash healthcare 5/n

so the point is - this is a virus that can crash health care. Let's stop that happening. We can think about how many people were infected and never knew later, right now let's focus on those who *absolutely* know they're infected 6/n

NYC has already seen more deaths from this than you would expect for a flu season in which *every man woman and child* was infected. And it's slowing (thank goodness), but not stopping 7/n

Rather than obsessing about the exact number of asymptomatic infections, we need to keep focusing on how to minimize new infections, and refine what we've been doing in terms of distancing to help maintain ourselves and our society during the pandemic 8/fin