Posted on 03/24/2020 10:51:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
There are basically three ways to stop the Covid-19 disease for good.
One involves extraordinary restrictions on free movement and assembly, as well as aggressive testing, to interrupt its transmission entirely. That may be impossible now that the virus is in over 100 countries.
The second is a vaccine that could protect everyone, but it still needs to be developed.
A third is potentially effective but horrible to consider: just wait until enough people get it.
If the virus keeps spreading, eventually so many people will have been infected and (if they survive) become immune that the outbreak will fizzle out on its own as the germ finds it harder and harder to find a susceptible host. This phenomenon is known as herd immunity.
Wide, unstoppable spread of the coronavirus is exactly an outcome experts are modeling in their worst-case scenarios. They say that given what they know about the virus, it could end up infecting about 60% of the world’s population, even within the year.
Those figures aren’t a random guess. They are informed by the point at which epidemiologists say herd immunity should kick in for this particular virus.
Last week the herd immunity idea blew up in the headlines after UK prime minister Boris Johnson indicated that country’s official strategy might be to put on a stiff upper lip and let the disease run its course. The chief science adviser to the UK government, Patrick Vallance, said the country needed to “build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.”
Yesterday, the prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, struck a similar note, saying, “We can slow down the spread of the virus while at the same time building group immunity in a controlled way.”
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
And it will only take between 60 and 80% of the population to get infected for us to achieve herd immunity. .....
The concept of herd immunity sounds all well and good, IF these reports I’m seeing about permanent lung damage are not true.
‘Herd immunity’ and ‘social distancing’ are related concepts. Herd immunity separates the infected from the target so that the vulnerable never come into contact with the infected.
Permanent lung damage is possible but is rare.
Although rare is still too much.
And it will only take between 60 and 80% of the population to get infected for us to achieve herd immunity. .....
Some of this “herd immunity” stuff being thrown about assumes people get it once and are done. That may not be the case with covid-19.
Permanent lung damage is possible but is rare.
The figures I’ve seen are both far from trivial, and very tentative. the tentative part surrounds a lot of this disease, since so few serious cases outside of China have actually recovered from the coronavirus, and fewer still for long enough to monitor.
And permanent is different from having decreased lung efficiency for several months.
Doesn’t have to be a la carte.
It actually doesn’t take much for herd immunity to significantly slow an outbreak.
Each person with immunity is like another isolation point. If you have 20% with immunity, and you thought that 10 people was a good limit, now you can have 12 people together, with the same result.
And if you infect 50% of the people who are not immune, you are actually only infecting 40% of the total population, so your load on hospitals is significantly decreased.
We may already have millions of people who recovered from this thing and never even knew it.
That’s where treatment steps in — if we have a treatment that reduces hospital stays from 14 days to 4 days, it’s like getting and extra 2.5 beds for every bed we have, and now we can let 4 times as many people get infected.
How does half the population become immune?
But do we know if decreased illness time due to treatment confers immunity to the virus? So many questions about this virus are unanswered at this time.
Like I said, rare is still too much.
I don’t know specific numbers. What did you hear?
“Herd immunity’ and ‘social distancing’ are related concepts. Herd immunity separates the infected from the target so that the vulnerable never come into contact with the infected.”
You can’t achieve herd immunity with social distancing. In a way it does the opposite. Social distancing is about keeping those that are not immune from getting infected. Thus when you eliminate that program and people start to come into close contact again, any stray virus will start the pandemic again, until everybody is either immune or dead.
On Rush’s show today, Todd Herman covered this “herd immunity” pretty well. It’s interesting. Dr. Birx mentioned it (didn’t explain it) also in the Fox News Townhall today.
You can’t achieve herd immunity with social distancing.
“Agreed, but because it acts in a similar way except the people in between are missing or elsewhere rather than immune.”
But now you got two herds, one immune and one not. Once you mix them again, you got a single herd that’s no longer immune.
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