There is a difference between the level of illness experienced by those who are vaccinated Vs those who get infected, so more old people will die as a result of infection than would die as a result of vaccination.
So no, it would not be better for healthy adults and kids to get it in Q2 2020. Also how do you propose that you only infect the healthy adults and kids?
That said, my guess would be normal reinfections would be less severe, more like a cold. There have been some severe reinfections but any reinfection under six months suggests something atypical in the immune response.
Also SARS-Cov-1 produced a longer immune response so that may happen here.
But lifelong sterilizing immunity seems pretty unlikely based on what we know so far. The vaccines aren’t aiming at sterilizing immunity actually, their goal is to greatly lower the severity of the infection.
You can get limited immunity from the common cold after being infected but you are just as likely to catch it 12 months later anyway. With covid that means we are dealing with it annually, which our health services cannot keep up with.
"Common cold" and "flu" is not 1 virus, but hundreds of different viruses which is why you get them repeatedly. You do build immunity though. It's why children always have a cold and adults a lot less common.
If you can't get immunity from the infection, how will the vaccine work?
No.
We have one population. There's no way to segment it to allow people at low risk to catch the virus without also allowing people at high risk to get it.
How do you think it could work otherwise?
As an abstract mathematical problem if somehow herd immunity could be achieved without a vaccine then it sounds like a fine idea. The fact is that immunity after infection does not last long enough to achieve significant enough immunity to get to a useful herd immunity. This of course is what all the medical experts understand which is why Europe is going through lockdowns and Putin has been hiding in a bunker. There have been strict lockdowns in China and most other major governments have taken some sort of similar response, even Sweden eventually. There is almost nothing all of these governments have ever agreed on so universally.
Don’t expect a reply justifying my comment on HN with robust data, I have better things to do with my time like play in a park.
If we let everyone get it in Q2 2020, millions would have died when we ran out of ventilators.
and nowhere that I'm aware of came close to running out of ventilators. New York, one of the hardest hit places in the world may have used a third of their available ventilators. They used around 1/2 of the ventilators they reported available to them in 2015 so it wasn't even close to being the limiting factor in healthcare.
How do you explain countries like Belarus, Serbia and Sweden, or parts of the US like South Dakota, where no or very lax measures were taken but what you describe didn’t happen?
In fact, is there any evidence that this happened anywhere, or is it all just conjecture based on modeling?
Seems to me that there is good basic evidence right there for Sweden's approach being much more deadly.
We can argue back and forth about the relative value of freedom vs lives or whether Denmark will ultimately have as many dead etc. But right now, it seems that controlling numbers saves lives...
https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+covid+deaths&rlz=1C1G...
Also, the CFR is likely intrinsic to the virus, modified slightly by patient population and type of medical care available (both of the latter are probably very similar between the two countries). So any differences in CFR between the two countries mostly reflects the testing issue.
If you do want to compare the two countries, then compare the per capita death rate from covid (assuming everyone who dies in both countries actually gets a covid test - that might not be the case for old people who die at home, where even in developed countries, their primary doctor will just issue a death certificate saying “old age” or “heart attack” in the absence of any information to the contrary. )
1. You cannot just rely on how many sick people happen to be tested. Every single serology study implies a IFR of well under one percent. I am willing to bet that it will end up between 0.1 and 0.6 % for any developed country.
2. You cherrypick your data if you compare Sweden with Denmark or Germany and not with France or the UK.
My hypothesis is that countries that protect the elderly, and especially nursing homes, well have much fewer deaths. In every country this is were the deaths are concentrated.
Not a good idea to catch it just to get immune.
In what percentage of people who get COVID-19 are there bad long-term effects? What other conditions did the people get bad long term effects have? How does these numbers compare with other diseases?
Would appreciate citations.
As you said there are scarce data yet, but the risks are scary. In these conditions, it's obvious one should avoid relying on a herd immunity induced by the virus.
And you could cite a claim you are making. Without numbers it is hard to say if this is a good basis for decisions.
As I said, we are in the presence of a huge risk and there is no "reassuring numbers" anywhere to counterbalance that.
As one reference on the risks I'm speaking of, here is an article about the action of the virus on the nerve cells:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-we-know-so-f...
By the way, between "relying on virus-induced herd immunity" and just keeping safe with mask and waiting for the vaccine to come, why the rush to get the virus??
There is a risk, there is the possibility to wait it over. So why just not do that and wait the safe solution?
There is no safe solution, it's a decision between protecting the 0.5% old, obese, and sick or the 99.5%
How to avoid it is the real discussion.
I could avoid it easily until now because everybody wears a mask here.
In some cases or in some countries, this is not possible, or too much people are infected already, and lockdown becomes the best solution.
Nobody is saying that lockdown is the only solution in every case, and absolutely nobody is even thinking that lockdown is making people happy.
Correlation versus causation.
We're in the middle of a major health emergency. Why are you attributing those to the effects of lockdowns, rather than the effects of the pandemic? You don't think that the risk to personal health of a potentially lethal virus, seeing older friends and relatives dying, and worrying about the risk of health systems collapsing are causing any of the above?
In March, someone I know in Italy passed on the virus to his grandfather, who died at home. All the ambulances in the area were tied up for hours. You can imagine the effect on his mental health. I doubt the impact was comparable to the effects of intermittent lockdowns.
(To avoid misunderstandings, evidence does not mean your unverified opinions).
I'm particularly interested in your methodology for arriving at 0.5%, so a detailed data dump on that from you would be very useful.
A uk study suggests 12% have symptoms longer than 30 days. Beyond that, hard to say. We also don’t havea good measure of invisible damage: do survivors have reduced lung function from pneumonia? Damage to endothelium predisposing to pneumonia? Too soon to tell.
About 20% of people are hospitalized.
Our old are going to get sick from vaccines, so the young are going to get it anyway. Next year under 50 year olds will line up for their vaccine.
Meanwhile 1.5 years worth of old, obese, and sick people will have died from coronavirus.
Wouldn't it have been better if healthy kids and adults caught it in q2 2020?
(Please no ancedotes of a sick 5 year old child dying from "coronavirus", statistics are necessary when discussing billions)