Xatticus wrote:pepe1991 wrote:Xatticus wrote:
I would guess that they are banking on herd immunity by that point, which seems increasingly likely given our current situation.
Herd immunity is already proven to be myth
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02948-4There are also cases of same people being infected more than once.
To the former, it isn't a myth. It is statistics. I'm not advocating for such an approach, but it is our current trajectory. This doesn't mean that you have eliminated the danger, but rather that the risks are mitigated by the fact that the majority of the damage has already been done. There is less risk of property damage if the building has already been razed. This won't eradicate the virus until the fuel (population) is entirely spent or until the number of current cases dwindles to zero.
The the latter, we don't know. We won't know until we know. You would certainly expect such reports to be widespread if there was no immunity associated with recovery though.
But epidemiologists have repeatedly smacked down such ideas. “Surrendering to the virus” is not a defensible plan, says Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Such an approach would lead to a catastrophic loss of human lives without necessarily speeding up society’s return to normal, he says. “We have never successfully been able to do it before, and it will lead to unacceptable and unnecessary untold human death and suffering.”
Issue of that approach is what happends if it fails? Complete collapse of health system?
This is why i refered to it as myth (as person who i qouted called whole notion himself, a myth.
“It’s a complete myth that you can just let the epidemic rage, protect the vulnerable, and achieve herd immunity. What may happen is…you fill the hospitals, you fill the morgues, and then the next year it happens again,” he says. “You’re not going to get enough people infected to achieve herd immunity and therefore you’ll have done it all for nothing.”
Typically, herd immunity is reached when the majority of people in a population are vaccinated. This threshold varies depending on the disease; about 95 percent of a population must be vaccinated to control an extraordinarily contagious disease like measles. It’s not certain yet what proportion of the population would have to be immune to COVID-19 to prevent the disease from spreading, Hanage says. He estimates that roughly 50 to 66 percent of the population would have to catch COVID-19 to reach herd immunity without a vaccine.
There have been more than 6 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and more than 184,000 deaths. For a country with a population of about 330 million people, this means that herd immunity is still a very long ways off. Even cities that were struck hard at the beginning of the pandemic, such as New York, haven’t reached that point. There may be tiny pockets where enough people have been infected that their family members or neighbors are unlikely to catch the disease, Hanage says. But that doesn’t prevent these people from becoming infected when they venture beyond their homes or city blocks.
- Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health.
Most people who use Sweden as example of hands-off strategy don't understand how unpopulated, yet big and cold that country is.
We talk about 10 million people,at average 25 people per kilometer. And in Norrland regions is under snow for months every year with temperature below zero, so it's not like many people will just hang around and get infected there.
Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. -John Lennon