I doubt we are in a '2nd wave'. None of the evidence points to the virus being around much earlier than thought in any significant amount. As for "By the end of May, most of us will have had it."..... hmmmm, again the data that is available from other countries suggests this will not be the case, especially with the measures we have taken. There is a chance that the antibody testing may not be a very accurate way of figuring out who has been infected (due to other immune responses playing a role) and it would be great if way more people have had it than we think but current estimates, which fit in with data from Germany, Netherlands etc suggest that in the UK ~10% of London may have had it but ~4% for the rest of the UK. A long way off most of the country having had it. Maybe we will have but I haven't seen any reports that actually show any data supporting that.
2 lab mates of mine (who I used to work in close proximity to) came down with presumed flu earlier in the year and were off one after the other with symptoms which could be considered 'classic covid'. While it is tempting to think they 'must have had it' it is unlikely. I came down with whatever they had very soon after. Shivering, chills, sweating buckets at night, aches, but no cough as they had. Tempting to think it was covid but probably wasn't. If it was then a lot of the company I work for will have had it given the proximity we used to work in, hot desking, shared use of lab equipment etc.
I agree with this entirely. There appear to be a number of people who are so opposed to the lockdown that they will latch onto any statement regarding the disease having been around for longer than we first thought, or that the virus is so contagious (and mild) that we've nearly all had it already without realising, without a care to how flimsy the evidence is to justify those claims.
Take the UK position for example. If you look at the number of positive tests under Pillar 1 of the government's testing strategy, out of a total of 680,000 people tested there have been 158,000 positive results. That's an overall proportion of just 23%, and those were the sickest patients, who were ill enough to be admitted to hospital and whom medical professionals had reason to suspect Covid-19. If less than a quarter of those people tested positive, what possible reason could we have to think that anywhere near that percentage of the general population might have already had it, let alone nearly all of them?
Of course, there's even less evidence for these assertions if we look at the rest of the testing data, such as Pillar 2. A total of 390,000 people have now been tested under Pillar 2, with around 44,000 being positive, so just 11%. Although that figure does include a wider range of people than Pillar 1, in most cases they will have had to be displaying symptoms in order to qualify for a test, so should be more likely to test positive than the general population.
I'm sure that someone will be along to say that these were only snapshot tests and that, just because someone tested negative one day, it doesn't mean they haven't had the virus at some point. However, my point is that this is actual evidence that the rate of positive tests has been relatively low, even amongst the extremely ill and those displaying Covid-like symptoms. In any event, the early antibody testing results aren't exactly in their favour either, especially the recently published Czech study.
It's evidence that's important in this debate, not simply hypotheses.
