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Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

There is a group of thought that believes that we should simply allow people to get sick as soon as possible so that the herd immunity forces the virus to burn out, and only quarantine those who are vulnerable (those over 65 and those with high-risk conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and leukemia).

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That group of thought has not yet managed to prove to anyone that if you catch it now, you'll be immune to a mutated strain.

Nor have they explained how we are going to a handle a situation where ~5-20% of the under-65 people who will catch it all at once will require hospitalization.

Hospitals in affected areas are currently overwhelmed, with people under 65 alone. Italy has stopped treating people under 60. And this is when the vast majority of people under-65 are not infected!

Somehow, I doubt their situation would improve if people over 65 stopped getting sick, while people under 65 started getting sick at 4x or 5x the rate.

Research had now shown that you do develop immunity once infected and recovered.

For this to have not been the case it would have been a very novel strain of covid indeed.

You can do it in phases, preemptively. If your area isn't overrun with the virus right now and isn't close to one that is (e.g. my area, with four hospitals and ~2 total confirmed cases), ask for volunteers to be infected, preferring those with a high likelihood of transmission (e.g. health care workers, bus drivers, grocery store clerks, etc) to less risky individuals (e.g. people who can work from home or have relatively solidary jobs, like sanitation workers).

It only really works if you act decisively and can infect enough of the population before the virus really gets started in your area. I would sign up for that, provided I didn't just father a child, if only to get it over with.

This would also allow us to study the virus under controlled conditions. Maybe the way of infection (or some other controllable aspect) has influence on the severity of the disease.

>That group of thought has not yet managed to prove to anyone that if you catch it now, you'll be immune to a mutated strain.

Isn't our current approach of social distancing also vulnerable to mutated strains? Except, of course, we keep social distancing forever. Possible mutations affect all strategies in the same way and can't be used as an argument against a strategy.

This is the absolutely worst way to go: they are essentially telling nature to take its course, killing what it has to kill. We might as well stop vaccinating people and stop taking any drugs - the 10 people left alive will surely have herd immunity.

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