My comment was about the use of “may” in news reports and opinion pieces, not in your post, Christy.
“May” is something of a “weasel word,” as those of us who have written newspaper stories and testimony know.
As for school starting, perhaps the older teachers can teach to a class In the school by video and have a young apprentice teacher In the classroom. Younger teachers could still teach in person. Those afraid to teach should certainly not teach.
The older teachers with underlying conditions may be at risk, and the risk is small for people under 30.
The plan to keep kids at home does not sound good to me.
Of course, some people will be scared and will want to home school their children. One of my grandchildren will be homeschooled. That should lower class sizes and make the restart of in-person school easier.
And lots of people are considering retiring early, not just teachers. This test-run of staying at home has been eye-opening to many.
May I quote you, oppressive number of “mays” and all? Attribution or no, your preference.
Quote me where? I don’t care, sure.
Where you were accused of using too many “mays”. 
I think Vance was saying I didn’t use enough “mays” and all the sources are just saying “may result in permanent damage.” But when you have a statistic that 66% of patients have X, you aren’t focusing on the fact that out of 100%, some people may not end up with X, you are focusing on the 66% that did. Yes, some of the noted long-term damage/effects may reverse themselves over time. But there is other damage, like tissue scarring and organ damage, that one can legitimately assume to be permanent, based on our knowledge of how scars and organ damage typically work. And you don’t need to qualify that amputated fingers may or may not heal. It’s permanent damage.
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If anyone says they are sure about something with this disease, it is a sure sign they have no idea what they are talking about.
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True. I think I may have said before that I don’t think we are finished with surprises.
Better to err on the protective side, especially with children and teachers, instead of pushing them into piranha filled waters. There is an education to be had that way too, to be sure!
Speaking of which, I heard on a news talk show earlier today a doctor reporting that there did not appear to be vertical transmission with pregnant moms, but I then got a breaking news notification within the last hour that yes, there has been one just reported. 
No, as I wrote before, my comment about “may” was not about your words but about the “may” qualifier in published reports. (See post 41.)
I regret not making that clear initially, but I have written it twice now and hope you finally accept it.
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Dale, how are you sure that the “protective” side is the one that denies children an education?
Well, I’m pretty sure that since you don’t get it at all, the efficacy of masking, that this is a global pandemic and that many countries are now back in trouble again or have new hotspots, I know not to trust your thinking!
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Something I have already referenced several times on my blog, but yet another study emerges that found pre-existing T-cell immunity to the COVID-19 virus in about 1/2 an unexposed control group (19/37). This is accepted for publication in Nature and released today.
From the conclusion, “Understanding the distribution, frequency and protective capacity of pre-existing structural or non-structural SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactive T cells could be of great importance to explain some of the differences in infection rates or pathology observed during this pandemic. T cells specific for viral proteins have protective ability in animal models of airway infections”
Evidence continues to accumulate that herd immunity develops at levels well below 60-70% (unless - and one could - one assumes that we start at a level well above 0%)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z_reference.pdf
Saw this earlier… is his thinking straight (for a non-scientist)?
I’d just ignore him. His reasoning completely overlooks the prevailing consensus that diagnosed cases represent the tip of the iceberg, and he isn’t even contemplating the possibility of pre-existing immunity.
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Probably true. I am working some with contact tracing, and in chatting with people with positive tests, for everyone actually tested, there are multiple people in close contact who have mild symptoms but never get tested. Then you have consider the truly asymptomatic.
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No one can tell by eye whether NY’s rate dropped because of interventions or because of herd immunity – as you yourself say here. Stop making claims for which you have no evidence.
I picked a nearly certain benefit that was widely known in the public health world and formed the basis of proposed mitigation strategies for pandemics, independent of health care resources, prior to the this outbreak. My point was and remains that there has always been more than one reason to slow down transmission.
This is rather offensive, since I explicitly based my comment on Ioannidis’s work on covid-19, not on prejudice – and also wrong, since I previously had a high opinion of him. To judge the quality of his work on the Santa Clara seroprevalance study, you could start by reading the Stanford whistleblower report on that study. For the multiple problems with his survey of IFR estimates, you could start here.
As for IFR estimates, I don’t know what Ioannidis was saying in March, but in April he was saying it was between 0.12% and 0.2%, obviously wrong numbers based on the shoddy Santa Clara study. Most of the people I was paying attention to in March – epidemiologists, public health experts, me – were basically right, e.g. Lipsitch, who said the CFR was probably in the range of 1-2% and the IFR substantially lower, although how much lower was unclear.
Huh? Who said anything about polling? The title of the linked article: “Swedish epidemiologist admits to flaws in country’s coronavirus response.” If you’re going to try to rebut a link, at least click on it first.
And the alternative is what?
None of which is relevant to using antibody tests immediately after infection to detect who has been infected – the question was how many were infected, not whether they are immune. There is, though, a major problem with the number I cited: the samples were taken early in the NY outbreak, and greatly underestimate the final number who were infected. The actual fraction of the population of NYC by the time the peak had passed was more like 20%. That still doesn’t tell you whether the peak reached the maximum possible or was, say, a third of that. The fact that R continues to be around 1.0 in NYC even with fairly strict compliance with masking and social distancing makes it clear that herd immunity is unlikely to be the full explanation.
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One serious flaw in his analysis is his assumption that the number of confirmed cases (about 37,000) is the number of total cases.
Some estimates have been that actual cases are 10 or more times confirmed cases.
Strange that an economist would make such an obvious error, but I have seen it happen before.
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