Ask HN: The Solution to Covid19?
1) Get fully quarantined for 20 Days , this will be choose be all people at risk (old, weak, existing illness). You will get food for 20 Days but otherwise your doors are closed and sealed.
2) Get intentionally infected and be allowed to go out and live as before. This will be chosen by young, healthy people like me who have extremely low chance of having serious issues with covid 19.
If we get the 60 million young and healthy to choose to be infected, after the 20 Days they will be immune and due to herd immunity even with a low amount of still active cases the virus can not spread anymore and dies out by itself.
Young and healthy people are less likely to need hospitalization / ICU by a factor of around 50 to 100.
Of the 60 millionen people infected about 100.000 - 200.000 will require hospitalization and about 20.000 to 40.000 will require ICU (spread over 3 weeks so maybe manageable).
If the virus just spreads randomly as it does now of the 60 million that will be affected sooner or later anyway 5 to 10 million will require hospitalization and 1 to 2 million ICU. Spread over a longer period (probably about 1 to 3 years) we might be able to handle that but still more people will die and every other aspect (economy, public life is affected for years instead of weeks)
TL;DR: The young and healthy should take the hit to save the old and weak. Also save economy and shorten the crisis as much as possible.