Doing that quickly means hospitals and morgues overflowing with dead from COVID.
We HAVE talked about this from the beginning - this is the point of “flattening the curve”. If we let a million Americans die in a short time, it’ll tank the economy and overwhelm our healthcare system and ability to treat not only this disease but all others at the same time.
It’d be one thing if we were testing and tracing to try and limit. But this YOLO strategy is a recipe for complete chaos.
Even more inportantly: we don’t understand the long term impacts for those who survive. What is the 5-year mortality rate from complications? The US DOD has already decided that COVID infection disqualifies you for future military service (ostensibly because of the lung complications, but they haven’t said why formally yet).
The YOLO strategy that some folks are proposing is insane given how much we don’t know about this disease. It would be like proposing in 1982 that we get everyone infected with AIDS so we had “herd immunity”. Think about how that would have worked out for us... and then tell me that it’s a good idea to do it this time.
There may be a time when we know enough to make smart risk decisions about this disease, but less than 6 months after emergence isn’t it.
IF a few things are true:
1. The population being infected matches the demographics of the US as a whole. If the population is instead "healthy people under 60", IIRC the deaths go from 1-2M to 10-20k.
2. There is no way to infect someone deliberately in a way that reduces death rates. Variolation [0] has worked in the past, and is a possibility here. If it provides an additional factor of 10 safety benefit, you could now estimate 1-2k deaths, down from 1-2 million.
If you "rip off the band-aid" then hospitals will be overrun and more people will die because they couldn't get adequate care. The idea is to slow transmission until we get better treatments or even a vaccine developed.
> Even in hotspots like New York City that have been hit hardest by the pandemic, initial studies suggest that perhaps 15-21%6,7 of people have been exposed so far.
(goes on to mention how many people are dying)
> Some have entertained the idea of “controlled voluntary infection,”9 akin to the “chickenpox parties” of the 1980s. However, COVID-19 is 100 times more lethal than the chickenpox.
(goes on to completely dismiss whether that would actually lead to some level of herd immunity)
I get that the disease is more deadly. But is this one of those cases where it's better to pull hard and rip the band-aid off in one go? Nobody seems to really want to broach this topic seriously.
> To reach herd immunity for COVID-19, likely 70% or more of the population would need to be immune. Without a vaccine, over 200 million Americans would have to get infected before we reach this threshold. Put another way, even if the current pace of the COVID-19 pandemic continues in the United States – with over 25,000 confirmed cases a day – it will be well into 2021 before we reach herd immunity. If current daily death rates continue, over half a million Americans would be dead from COVID-19 by that time.
It's unclear to me whether the author is stating that herd immunity would take too long under the condition that we completely opened up the global economy or if we all continued to stay isolated.
We're definitely not going to reach 70% with the way things are.