There was very little talk of 'vulnerability rate', rather it was the 'attack rate' and overall proportion of population that the models expected to ultimately be infected in a situation where there was zero mitigation or behavioural changes that got most of the attention. And nothing that I read back then ever came out with 100% for that. The numbers that ended up being mentioned in press conferences of the time were more like 70-80% if we did no mitigation. Lets look at what the Imperial College model said:
(from
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf )
Theres loads of assumptions and data that was fed into models back then that would be a bit different if we repeated the exercise now, that much is true. And it does my head in that as far as the most famous UK model was concerned, I dont think I've seen much in the way of the exercise being repeated later with a refined set of assumptions and inputs. I'm going to try to look into this myself more but it doesnt seem to be very easy to find stuff beyond the first key month. When it comes to timing errors its quite easy to see that the Imperial Colleges timing estimates were all wrong when it came to the UK, because the surveillance data they fed into it was crap and if the excuse in some SAGE minutes is anything to go by, they also failed to correct for data timing lags when feeding that data into their model. The rest of what was wrong is far less easy to establish. I would also like to update my sense of hospitalisation %ages so far in different age groups, as thats important stuff. And we know that a lot of assumptions about what proportion of cases would be asymptomatic, and the role of asymptomatic cases in transmission, were probably quite far wide of the mark. But I havent seen many attempts to calculate the implications of this. Whats happened to those various academics etc from various disciplines who produced alternative pictures from the start, which were then often used by those who wanted to argue against lockdown? Are they still out there, producing new work? Because if the things you are suggesting have really already been proven wrong, I would expect them to seize on that and run updated calculations that serve their point of view. I havent looked recently, so maybe they have, in which case I would like someone to point it out.
As with some of our previous discussions I do understand where you are coming from regarding the immunity picture. Unlike you I am utterly unclear as to what exactly has been proven on this front so far, given that there has been mitigation and behavioural changes which mean we have not had a view of an unmitigated pandemic wave. And if you want modelling to take account of what you think has been shown on this front, you need to have some alternative numbers to feed in, and a sense of why those numbers are better than the original estimates. Its no good just saying that the 100% vulnerability assumption was wrong, without providing an alternative number or at least a reasonable range. And then you actually have to go and look at exactly if and how such a number was actually used by the models in the first place.