If it wasn't possible to be reinfected, I'd say the wise thing to do would be to get yourself infected now, while you can still get a respirator in the hospital.
I don't think this is true, and since we still don't know enough about true fatality rates outside of China (yet) it seems foolish to be fatalistic at this stage about containment. There's no "shoring up the [US] health care system". We can't build hospitals out of thin air (China's attempt notwithstanding), and we can't apparate more medical devices, whose supply chains are broken because of our dependence on China. Limiting infections - especially in higher risk demographics - seems critical at this point.
>If it wasn't possible to be reinfected, I'd say the wise thing to do would be to get yourself infected now, while you can still get a respirator in the hospital.
Uhhh no. This would needlessly stress the existing infrastructure. If you're young and healthy, don't soak up resources that should be used to care for at-risk populations. WFH and wash your hands.
We've already failed at this - it's in the community, cases are popping up with no known contact with an infected person. Asymptomatic cases are contagious for several days, and in a large chunk of patients it presents as a common cold that they won't go to the hospital for, and even if they could there isn't enough capacity to do the necessary testing. Game over.
Seems like a lot of “we can’t” assertions. If any country started seeing ~1M deaths per month or something, I bet they’d somehow figure out a way to do it.
I hope that, deep in the Pentagon, someone is asking these questions. Not necessarily because of COVID-19, but just in general.
I'm assuming you can get it twice, based on recent news[1], that's why I said:
> If it wasn't possible to be reinfected
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
Long duration shedding even after recovery is a more likely explanation than than re-infection. But even that's not good news if someone is contagious after they've recovered. https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1231662145156374528
Possibly those weeks could make a difference; I'd imagine vaccine development is highly parallelised relative to a normal year, and there may be something in the next 6 months. 4 weeks in that scenario could be huge.
> Marks said a real late-stage trial to test a vaccine is likely “months away.” One concern is that some previous coronavirus vaccines have caused worsening of the disease, not improvement.
> “We have to make sure that as we proceed with development, we’re not creating problems,” Marks said. It might be realistic, he said, for studies of vaccines to begin by the summer, although that timeline is still aggressive.
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/26/coronavirus-vaccines-are...