My name is Stephan Luckhaus, I am currently the senator
for mathematics in our (german) national academy Leopoldina.
I do not agree with the recommendations of our academy for
the covid pandemic. Based on the data on the epidemy in Germany,
published by the Robert Koch Institute and on a class of models
of mathematical epidemiology, I reach two conclusions:

First the mortality for the people below 65 or even 70 is low.
How low depends on the rate of confirmed cases to all infections.
Antibodytests will eventually give that number, but there is
good reason to assume that this rate is only 5% in Germany,
much higher in Iceland and much lower in Italy.
These 5% are explained in the fourth episode of this series.

Second there is no hope to reach a sustainable equilibrium state
without a fairly high level of natural immunization at least among
the more active part of the population, that is based on models of
different complexity that have been developed in mathematical epidemiology.
I explain these models with little to no formulas in episodes 1-3.

My personal conclusion: the lockdown for the whole population
is not saving any lives in the long run, strict quarantining combined
with repeated testing of a large percentage of the whole population
might but is economically unsustainable.
The only reasonable strategy is to get to 'natural' herd immunity
in the less vulnerable part of the population quickly, less vulnerable
means everybody under 40, and use e.g. immunized staff in nursing homes
as much as possible.

The punch line: infections of under 40 years old are more often positive
than negative and should not be avoided.

If you are a scientist or know generally calculus then the more
mathematical episodes 5-7 might be also of interest.
I also have a preprint connected to this discussion on the
preprintserver of the Max Planck Institute Mathematics in the Sciences:
[ Ссылка ]

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