The definition of herd immunity is a certain percentage of people contract a virus ( or gets vaccinated), and when you get to a certain number, it protects the vulnerable.
Being as a vaccine will not be in use for 18 months, the only way of herd immunity NOW is by catching and recovering from the virus.
Isolating people will not work, it only takes one person to restart a pandemic.
That is the hard fact of life.
“The definition of herd immunity is a certain percentage of people contract a virus ( or gets vaccinated), and when you get to a certain number, it protects the vulnerable.”
And if you do it all at once it crashes the HCS and then the economy. And 1 in 11 people die. Which permanently destroys the HCS and creates a depression.
So a metered approach is best while we develop countermeasures such as a vaccine, treatments such as HCQ+AZT, and build the friggin’ ventilators and other medical items we will need and make the drugs we will use.
What’s so hard about that?
Build what we need now. Make the drugs used to treat. Develop vaccine for future inoculations.
Gradually expose the population, keeping the case load low enough so that our HCS, now going into war mode, can sustain the load and respond to hotspots. That way, the 1.something% CFR, like in South Korea, which is horrible enough, does not become the 9.something% CFR, like in Italy.
What’s so hard about that, either?
please provide evidence of herd immunity from any country in the world re: Wuhan Virus. It’s not in Iran, not in Italy, not in Spain, not in France, not even in China or Hong Kong. In fact, a second infection from Wuhan Virus (or, perhaps more rightly, a resurgence of the original infection in a patient) appears to be more fatal than the first.
The problem is, even if the old people remain sequestered, there could still be enough severe cases at one time to slam the hospitals, which already have various severe cases of everything else. So, if we do this, it would be quite necessary to try to keep teleworking when possible, avoiding other people for the most part (sorry, extroverts), not congregating in large groups, maybe only allow businesses to have half the occupancy that the fire codes permit, and legally punish people who don’t follow quarantine if they’re suspected of exposure to WuFlu.
The ideal, to me, would be a slow burn, rather than all at once.