I'm not going to go get permanent lung damage and spend weeks in the ICU just so we can reopen the economy. The IFR is one thing but the long-term effects of this illness are severe. Frankly the idea that we younger people should "go take one for the team" is as unconscionable now as it was when the older generation started the Vietnam war draft.

A "few weeks on the ICU"? Oh come on, that's melodramatic for the great bulk of the cases if you are healthy. You aren't going to spend "weeks" on a ICU, believe me.

self-infect and self-quarantine, so you won't accidentally spread it to the immune repressed or grandma or whatever. Not only is this not "unconsciounable", I think the opposite. I have great respect for people who put themselves out of their way to protect other, less fortunate people.

Go right ahead and please show us all how it's done.

How long until the ICU has drained the queue of supplies and tools that we forced the economy to stop producing? I don't think the government has enough visibility into that supply chain to reopen it in a way that works without the rest of the economy.

As in a draft, the alternative is that one's community and entire way of life ends forcibly.

No one ever wants to be drafted, but sometimes an enemy larger than our personal preferences emerges.

We all live at this crossroads of time having, essentially, zero input into now. Now demands sacrifice. So it goes.

Did we ever get any good information on the rates of permanent lung damage or hospitalization for young people? I feel like over-focusing on fatality could cause us to overlook the more pragmatic risks.

On the Diamond Princess Cruise, they found lung damage in 54% of asymptomatic cases. I would call that a cause for concern.

https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/ryct.2020200110

Mean age on Diamond Princess was 62, and the paper doesn't break lung damage up by subpopulations like "younger people" so it's hard to generalize. But I'm not blase.

Plenty of comments implying that we're "all going to get it", which may be pretty much true in some areas in the US and Europe. I'm still holding out hope that being in Australia we may get a handle on it (although we just saw a huge cluster in a meatpacking plant). It's interesting to think that we might be heading for a world where some countries have had 60% prevalence and others have had 0.6% prevalence - what does that do for travel, trade, migration, tourism - all that stuff?

It's impossible to tell just from imaging a month or two down the road how "permanent" damage is. Yes, it's concerning. But we also don't know that it can't heal in time. Just because it looks like things we "know" on a CT doesn't mean we know how it acts long term.

Before you downvote me, think about all the reports of people with VERY low oxygen saturation that "shouldn't be" alert, talking, and feeling ok. That goes against everything we "know" as well, but it's very real for this disease.

Meh, the lung damage was "mild" in the bulk of the cases.

What does "mild" mean?

Meaning it's not a big deal in any real world way.

Not always. COVID-19 was described as “mild” at the outset. Turns out their operational definition of “mild” was something like “doesn’t require a trip to the ICU even though it may require hospitalization.” Not everything you read will use the word “mild” in its conventional sense.

Everyone is going to catch this. A vaccine will not exist for another year. The world can’t be shut down for another year. When everyone eventually catches this, some will have permanent lung damage. That sucks. Pretending this isn’t going to happen is foolish.

If we get the case count low enough we can open up and do contact tracing until the vaccine arrives or it's eliminated... if we open up before it's that low, everyone gets it.