How do you know that the concept of “herd immunity” exists for this virus?
If prior exposure confers immunity, than it does. If people who have survived the virus can either be readily reinfected, or remain long term carriers, it doesn't.
So, the answer to your question is "I don't know, but many past infectious disease outbreaks have reached a herd immunity state."
But that wasn't the point of my original post. I think that either the CDC is being completely alarmist, in saying that half the tests are bad, which implies a 50% false positive rate. If they aren't, then the manufacturers are peddling very bad tests.
There is one other possibility that occurs to me, though. If you have a 5% false positive rate (a 95% accurate test, neglecting false negatives), and you say the population has 10% exposure, yes, you could be off by 50%. But that's not a very precise statistic--no herd immunity at 10%! Whether its 5% or 10% of the population that's been exposed, it doesn't alter policy considerations.
Did it exist for other corona SARS viruses? It’s a new virus, but not all that new.
“Herd immunity“ is just another name for “natural immunity“ - and “natural immunity“ is just a term for any immunity that is stimulated by natural exposure the population, rather than by artificial exposure in a lab (vaccine).
The important thing to remember is that “natural immunity” is the only kind of immunity we have. There is no man-made alternative to the human body’s ability to develop antibodies.
Man-made vaccines developed in the lab still rely on the same principle of stimulating the human body’s natural immunity through exposure - the difference is that the exposure process takes place in a lab with test subjects rather than naturally through the “herd”.
Each of us is a complex walking laboratory, perfected over ten million years of evolution (natural selection).
So, before we discount “natural herd immunity” as some crackpot anti-science alternative medicine idea, we should remember that man-made vaccine technology relies 100% on the body’s immunity system to work. 100%!
Let that sink in: It is our bodies that ultimately save us, even with a vaccine. In fact, a vaccine’s effectiveness is measured by how it compares to natural immunity.
To be fair, there are certain advantages to man being able to control the process of exposure via vaccine technology. It allows for monitoring progress under controlled conditions. It allows us to track who is immunized and who is not.
For liberty-loving Americans there are some disturbing aspects of vaccine vs. natural (herd) approach to immunity as well. Obviously, vaccine technology is far more conducive to central planning and socialist agendas than is natural immunity. You can’t control people even letting them do whatever they want. Already, leftists are talking about requiring under-the-skin chips to track who has been immunized. Seriously?
And let’s not forget the profit motive. Big Pharma owns much of the DC bureaucracy and Ivy League academia - they can patent vaccines but they can’t make a dime on herd immunity.
As we decide which scientists to listen to, we should always follow the money.
ecUse it is not different than any other virus on the face of the earth.
I agree that the concept of herd immunity may be inoperable in the case of this virus.
I don’t believe ‘herd immunity’ was achieved anywhere with the similar SARS-CoV-1. Basically, no one knows where it went. One thought is that it ‘fizzled’, that is, it just lost its virulence, due to deleterious mutations. https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-study-revealing-covid-19-mutations-weakening
This leads to a very counterintuitive hypothesis. The way to defeat the virus is to have as many infections as possible in the shortest amount of time. As an RNA-based virus, it has no checks against faulty reproduction. And the virus can only reproduce by infection of cells. So, the more infections, the more negatve mutations, and the more mutations the faster the virus population is denatured.
If this is true, the worst possible thing to do is to slow the rate of infection, yet another reason that the lockdowns were a colossal blunder. As soon as it was determined that the the virus was minimally lethal to those less than 60 years and that the hospitals were in no danger of overcapacity, the society should have opened fully, the elderly protected, and the epidemic treated like the flu.
And if one looks at the trajectories of the disease in heavily infected states one sees that the downside after the crisis has been far steeper than in those states where the lockdowns were ‘successful’ in flattening the curve. In the latter group the norm is a fairly steep rise in cases, followed by an agonizingly slow decline.