A rough estimate of future COVID deaths now that herd immunity is unlikely

Last update: Monday 5/10/21

Apoorva Mandavilli, a highly respected NY Times reporter focused on the coronavirus, recently published an article that was derived from her interviews with prominent epidemic experts. She reported that a consensus among these experts has quietly emerged  that achieving herd immunity is no longer a realistic goal for the U.S.  

(Please read "Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe", Apoorva Mandavilli, NY Times, 5/3/21 ...  or listen to a podcast of Mandovilli discussing her article and why she wrote it, The Daily, 5/7/21)

The experts cited two reasons for their pessimism:

1. Substantial vaccine hesitancy among the U.S. population, perhaps as high as 30 percent. The U.S. population is currently around 330,000, 000. So 30 percent of that total = 99,000,000 adult vaccine refusers (and their children)
   
   
2. The fact that billions of people outside of the U.S. will not be vaccinated within the next few years guarantees the continuing emergence of substantial mutations that will be more resistant (possible totally resistant) to our vaccines. 

According to these experts, the best we can hope for now is to reduce the virus to a a serious but manageable disease, like the seasonal flu, by vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible.  (Note: This logical end state was suggested in another note on this blog two months ago: "Ending the coronavirus pandemic when it becomes a 'flu'", 3/5/21.)

So now we have to ask:  how many unvaccinated people will die in the next year or so; and will that many deaths (and prior hospitalizations) be manageable by our healthcare system? 

We can derive a very rough estimate of the expected deaths if we make a plausible, but unprovable assumption that the vaccine refusers are just like the rest of the population -- except for their refusal to be vaccinated. In other words, we will assume that the vaccine refusers social distance about as much (or as little) as the overall population, wear masks in public as much (or as little) as the overall population, wash their hands as frequently (or infrequently) as the overall population, have as many (or as few) preconditions as the overall population, etc, etc, etc. These assumptions allow us to infer that vaccine refusers will be hospitalized and die at roughly the same rate as the overall population died before vaccines became available.

According to the following article in the NY Times, 500,000 people died in the U.S. from Covid-19 between late February 2020 and early April 2021. That's a little more than 12 months, but close enough for making a rough estimate.

"Covid-19: U.S. Surpasses 500,000 Covid-19 Deaths, a Monumental Loss", NY Times, 4/12/21

This implies that there might be around 30% of 500,000 = 150,000 coronavirus deaths among the 99,000,000 vaccine refusers (and their children) within the next 12 months. The fact that the 500,000 deaths that occurred during the first year of the pandemic greatly strained, but did not break the U.S. healthcare system suggests that our system will be able to manage 150,000 more deaths (and prior hospitalizations) in the next year or so among the vaccine refusers. Seasonal flu killed about 80,000 victims per year in recent years, so the coronavirus vaccine refusers will face a new kind of "flu" that is manageable, but about twice as deadly.

Of course, substantially higher numbers of deaths may occur if vaccinated people die from new mutations that emerge from inside or from outside the U.S., mutations that are highly resistant (or totally resistant) to our current vaccines. Even if our current vaccines can be "updated" to cope with the new variants, more people will die during the period required to develop and distribute the updated vaccines.

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Related notes on this blog:

• "Ending the coronavirus pandemic when it becomes a 'flu'", Last update 3/5/21
  
  
• "N95 masks for everyone!!! ...Groundhog Day mutations", Last update  1/29/21