> even the greediest tech company (oracle!) Has not thought of to charge for documentation
Oracle sells products/services that thousands or millions of organizations purchase. That's a completely different kind of business arrangement than something that a single entity purchases once. If you hire a software consultant to build you a custom system, they're definitely going to charge you for the time they spend writing documentation.
Not hard to imagine scenario after political wrangling where initiative is launched and the first thing the new entity does is buy Oracle for HR very special edition which eats up all the budget for the first years of its life. And nothing is left to the original reason for being for that entity.
> As of 24 April 2020, no study has evaluated whether the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity to subsequent infection by this virus in humans.
The most likely thing is that it does mean immunity, but the WHO isn't going to say that without clear evidence.
I don't think that fully explains it. There are plenty of European cities of similar density to NYC that haven't been hit nearly as hard. Naples Italy, for example.
> New York City had the highest positive rate at 21.2%. The potential good news to come to light is that the death rate may be far lower than some estimates, at 0.5%.
How do they get to 0.5%? According to NYC data if you include "probable" cases, 15,400 people, or 0.18% of the population, are already dead. Wouldn't that imply 0.9% fatalities if the whole city was infected?
The data that NYC publishes daily is super interesting since it breaks down cases/deaths by race, gender, age (group), and presence of underlying health conditions [1].
The gist of it is that the majority of deaths from COVID-19 were suffered by people who had some kind of other health issue. As of the most recent data (April 22 at 6pm), 61 deaths were from people with no underlying health issues, 7,474 from people known to have underlying health issues, and 2,755 from people with unknown status [0]. The elderly in poor health are much more likely to die than the young in poor health. But when healthy, the elderly have pretty close to the same fatality rate as the young [2].
It would not be ruled as a significant factor leading to death in many of those cases, and for the rest, NYC residents might be more at risk due to higher average viral dose (subways). Also there is a lag in IgG antibody production, the test has imperfect sensitivity, and some portion of exposed people may never develop detectable antibodies. Some of these confounding variables are probably baked into the estimate.
> The closer we get, the better it is. Having 21% "immune" leads to far different outcomes than .1%.
It depends on how long the immunity lasts. If it's permanent, this is indeed great. If it lasts only a few months, this 21% won't make any difference for another wave of infections this fall.
We use the term "immunity" but we should remember that there is a difference between the presence of active antibodies and the presence of immune "memory cells". The latter hang around long-term, even if the former disappear. So at a minimum if one does develop infection they will recover far sooner and with better outcomes. And likely will reach a far lower peak viral load which might bring down transmission.
Of course, there's other confounds. Like the somewhat recent discovery that we end up with antigen experience / "memory" of diseases that we've never contracted. (Perhaps from viral fragments in the environment??)
It shouldn't be surprising that some people think that. Most people still feel that way about most narcotics.