For example why not pursue a policy such as: kids can go to school unless they live with someone who is at risk (since we know that children are at very low risk for complications). Similar to how we managed chickenpox before there was a vaccine.
I think we need to explore alternatives to lockdowns because I believe the economics of lockdowns will make them impossible to continue for very long. At the moment people see this as a "be heroic and do the right thing" issues, but most people don't yet understand the severity of the economic impact and haven't yet been personally affected by it. Lockdowns will probably become politically untenable by May or June whether anyone today likes that fact or not.
It's tricky to take large bites here because of the short doubling time compared to the relatively longer recovery time -- in the ~3 weeks it takes your currently-infected cohort to recover, your infected population could increase 100-fold if you aren't careful. Mistiming things -- misjudging how many people are currently infected -- by a couple of days can be difference between exposing 10% of your population to the risk and exposing 15%. There's a reason pandemics are often compared to forest fires.
This will get easier as time goes on, as the doubling period gets longer and longer.
Based on current estimates of how many people will die in the US, you can infer that we currently expect 5-10% of the population to be exposed in this first wave; I believe what widespread testing there has been in Italy leans towards about 10% of that population having been exposed there as well.
Only if you would like to see the hospitals overwhelmed with cases that don't result in fatalities but kill lots of other people and also kill people with underlying conditions that would otherwise live full and productive lives.
But if you expose kids to COVID now, they will in turn expose their parents, who will expose their coworkers, etc, etc
I could see that being effective strategy if we didn’t have a vaccine in 30 years, but for now, most people are still susceptible.
Because kids are the most likely to ignore even simple ways of preventing infection. Then you get exponential growth via kids and the health system implodes.
"Significantly less than 200 million Americans catching it" is still on the table.
"Herd immunity" is just the point at which the reproduction rate of the disease falls below 1 because the average infected person does not encounter anyone else to infect (because everyone else has already been infected) before they recover. It's not a binary switch, though -- as the percent of the population that has recovered grows, the reproduction rate shrinks steadily.
This means, for instance, that if we had X infected individuals before the lock downs, and then -- because we can't stay completely locked down forever -- we at some point have X infected individuals again after the lock downs end, we're actually in a much better place, because the reproduction rate of the disease is lower and that X will become 2X much slower than it would have before the lock downs.
This also synergizes with stay-at-home orders, which also reduce the reproduction rate of the disease. Right now we're relying entirely on stay-at-home to reduce the reproduction rate to as close to (or below) 1 as possible, but in a month or two, once a portion of the population has recovered, we'll be able to rely on a mix of "herd immunity" and stay-at-home to achieve the same thing; it's entirely reasonable that we can drag it out for years, and that less than 50 or 100 million Americans will catch it before a vaccine is developed.
It isn't hopeless.
> Around 0.5% will die, overwhelmingly those who had a low remaining life expectancy to begin with. This is a much larger body count than most people seem able to accept, but also much less dangerous to the average American than many believe.
We're currently losing 12-17 years of life per death, based on the statistics out of New York. It's older folks, sure, but it's hardly just taking people off their death beds.