This article was just published on how far we are from herd immunity for COVID-19. Although the title is definitely correct, the article has a surprising number of important issues and errors in it. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/28/upshot/coronavirus-herd-immunity.html">https://www.nytimes.com/interacti...

First, they show graphics of seroprevalence in different locations as if they are accurate estimates of the population exposed. There are 7 locations in the main figure. I might have missed something but I have not seen a paper of any kind for any of the studies. None.

Given possible biases in serosurveys the results could be off by sizeable amounts (e.g. 2x). Again, biases aren& #39;t going to change conclusion that we& #39;re far from herd immunity, but showing seroprev # as if they are from an unbiased published study when they aren& #39;t isn& #39;t helpful.

Error #1: Article says infection fatality rate of flu is 0.1-0.2% with no source. That is much higher than estimates I& #39;ve seen. This thread w/ refs suggests flu IFR: 0.02-0.05%, or 2-10x lower than NY Times article. Perhaps they mean the CFR? https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1243466404415909889">https://twitter.com/AdamJKuch...

This is not helpful given the huge controversy over IFRs, and confusion b/w IFR and CFR: https://twitter.com/DiseaseEcology/status/1252844190070829056">https://twitter.com/DiseaseEc...

Finally, there is a grossly oversimplified quote at end of article by @AndrewNoymer. I think goal was to say that no immunity exists to SARS-COV-2, but all 328M Americans are NOT equally susceptible to infection, & this matters for herd imm: @mgmgomes1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v3">https://www.medrxiv.org/content/1...

You can do better @nytimes.