Fine. But just be aware you may pay it with two years of unemployment. Or rather someone less qualified and educated.

they also don’t want to spread it to their parents or grandparents and kill them

>> Why spend 2 weeks

To acquire immunity while there are still hospital beds available in some places, in the unlikely event that you need one. That won't be the case a month from now.

How utterly and inconceivably selfish. How would that work out if everyone thought like that?

Is it really? I've heard there's some logic to this…

If instead, we all stay home and quarantine, the second we start reducing the quarantine the virus flares back up again. If instead, we start acquiring immunity in low-risk populations, at a rate that the hospitals can sustain, we'll have a degree of herd immunity and a portion of the population that can no longer spread it.

I'm certainly not an epidemiologist though; anyone smarter than me that can way in on that thinking?

> If instead, we start acquiring immunity in low-risk populations, at a rate that the hospitals can sustain, we'll have a degree of herd immunity and a portion of the population that can no longer spread it.

A fair portion of low-risk people will require intervention. Given that a lot more people are low than high risk, you're still overwhelming the health system, and all those low-risk people are still going to interact with others while they are asymptomatic but transmissible.

Delaying the pandemic buys time. Time is the most critically short resource.

Time means more ICUs, more ventilators. It means industrial capacity can shift from making consumer goods to medical supplies like masks. It means medical personnel get training and experience with the disease instead of shooting in the dark. It means labs and research teams can give more informed treatment advice.

It means small businesses and industries can try to reallocate resources and jobs and maybe save part of the economy. It means more time to educate the population to avoid high risk activities, wear masks, wash hands and so forth.

In every way it’s better if we delay the pandemic now that we know about it than if we just let it peak exponentially and kill the maximum number of people.

Studies show it wouldn't work if _everyone_ thought like that at the same time. But studies also show that you need to "pulse" the infection rate among low-risk populations in order to get past this in a controllable fashion by temporarily and partially lifting the restrictions on those people and letting them acquire immunity, while carefully isolating and supporting the high risk populations. The fundamental truth of the situation is: 60-70% will have to go through the wringer before this is over. "When", "which subset", and "how" will determine the fatality rate. One thing is absolutely clear: we _must_ completely isolate (and support) the elderly and those with severe pre-existing conditions. Large numbers of immune people could help with that. Complete shutdown of the economy (if such a thing were even possible) would condemn a lot of the vulnerable people to die, since they still need food and a lot of them also need medical care, which could become unavailable, like in Italy.

And if that wants to get organized I can see how that would work. "Get sick to beat the rush", however, is not that - it's an action where the only good outcome would be if only you do it, which I think is a definition of selfishness.

Thats fine, but as things are right now, we're short on beds in a few places, and are wasting beds everywhere else. Seems like a waste of the precious resources to me.

You do realize that any decision made today will reap benefits in more than a week, right? Those beds may no longer be wasted by the time you're ready to take advantage of them.

I'm a big fan of selfishness so I'll represent the 'that is just a bad idea' argument:

1) Such an individual would be contracting an unknown virus in an environment where hospital staff are the least prepared and practiced at dealing with it.

2) Such an individual is still exposing themselves to high risk of mistiming the outbreak and hitting it at the peak.

3) They might accidentally catch a different disease thinking it is COVID. Then if they got COVID they'd have 2 diseases; which is probably going to be quite bad.

If we all avoid getting COVID-19 for, say, another 2 months it is likely we'll have an available and effective drug for treating it. There are something like 5 different candidates I've heard of, so even if the odds of any individual one working out are <30% there is still a good chance there will be effective treatment by mid year. The contain, delay and avoid strategy really is a better bet.

> it is likely we'll have an available and effective drug for treating it

I don't believe this is likely at all. At best we will have something that kinda sorta works in some patients. If this was likely we'd have a drug for the common flu long time ago. To remind you, the flu takes about 50K lives in the US every year.

There are effective drugs for common flu strains; including a set of vaccines. And if the US manages to get COVID-19 related deaths down to 50k lives for 2020 that will be pretty peachy.

There won't be a vaccine this year. That's pretty clear. Vaccines take a long time to get tested under the best of circumstances. If not tested properly and administered to millions of people (which they'd have to be in order to have effect) they could cause a lot of adverse reactions and deaths all on their own. Don't take this as antivax bullshit: I do take a flu vaccine every year myself, including this year, my kid is fully vaccinated also (+ flu vaccine last year - I told him to "be a man"). It's just the nature of the beast - immune system can really fuck one up once it really gets going.