1. A Heard Immunity Threshold (HIT) thread.

This piece that was played @MSNBC on the @maddow show is grossly incompetent and meant purely to illicit fear.

This series of tweets will prove why and will also hopefully provide the basis of the nuanced approach by @SWAtlasHoover https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1306815474848673792

2. In order to arrive at 6,385,500 dead Americans, they used a HIT of ~65% with a fatality rate of ~3%. This is a gross overestimate of the IFR which differs significantly based on the age of the person infected. Below is the latest estimates of the IFR from the CDC.

3. Using the US population by age as provided by https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/

And using the CDC IFR charts and a 65% HIT threshold evenly across all age groups, the number of deaths would actually be:

0-19: 1,592
20-49: 16,849
50-69: 261,235
79+: 1,285,011

Total of 1,564,687

4. So MSNBC only overestimated US deaths with a 65% HIT by 4,820,813.

However, even 1,564,687 dead Americans is still an unacceptable plan of action.

Now what if we don’t lockdown those under 50 y/o and let them proportionately get infected more than older at risk Americans?

5. If we allow those <50 to get infected at an 80% rate and those from 50-69 at a 50% rate and those 70+ we really severely protect to keep their infection rate at 10%. At ~65% HIT the numbers look like this:

0-19: 1959
20-49: 20,738
50-69: 200,950
70+: 296,541
Total: 520,188

6. So a much more nuanced approach of letting younger healthy less at risk people get infected at a higher rate than those at risk will lower the deaths from 1,564,687 to 520,188.

Although that’s significantly better, that would still be an unacceptable pill to swallow.

7. Now what if I told you that the HIT/burnout might be a lot lower and closer to 25% seroprevalence! Through cross reactive immunity from T-cells and other factors, there’s now mounting evidence that this is actually likely to be true. https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1308824105878040577

8. There are also real world examples like Sweden, NY and NJ where the seroprevalence is around 20-25% and their pandemics are effectively over and it’s not because they’re “behaving.”

So you can scoff at this notion, but I believe the HIT/burnout is much closer to 25% than 65%.

9. If the HIT is ~25% and you allow the different age groups to be infected at the following rates through selective age based protections:

0-49: 35%
50-69: 10%
70+: 5%

Deaths would look like this:

0-19: 857
20-49: 9,073
50-69: 40,190
70+: 98,847

Total: 148,967

10. Given what we now know, locking down the young and healthy is exactly the WRONG thing to do as it will lead to MORE death and economic destruction! Open the schools, sports stadiums, clubs, restaurants, theme parks, etc! Spend the billions to protect those at risk!

11. As Bill Maher correctly said 3 months ago, let the young have their “Storm the beaches” moment! He was dead on with this take!