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Blue Origin pressures employees to travel to rural TX to test launch New Shepard

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23 pointsTechieKid21 comments

Enough, already! Get volunteers, and get it done!

All “at risk” and any scared people should be self-isolating, and the rest of us should be voluntarily holding raves and getting this civilization to “herd immunity” level by 2-3 weeks from now.

For healthy <55 year olds, the probability of catastrophic failure and death is low enough that 100m people getting sick over 2-3 weeks should be manageable.

The alternative — a year of social distancing and partial quarantine — stands a good chance of seriously damaging or destroying our civilization.

Put on some big-boy pants, and lets get this done.

This is not only delusional but dangerous. The fiction that this only impacts people over 55 is going to kill people.

It is delusional that stretching out achieving herd immunity to a year will not be destructive.

Because, that’s what you’re betting on.

> “My biggest concern, flat out, is the sickness is spread by people traveling point to point. It can be reduced by people sheltering in place. We are doing the opposite of that. We are taking people to a location that is vulnerable and ill equipped to handle travelers at this time,” one employee says.

> Van Horn only has a small clinic and hospital, and Hinojos says most patients are sent to El Paso or Odessa if they need serious care.

It's not about the <55 year old employees getting sick. It's about putting an entire rural town at risk of infection from a state with severe infection rates - a town that has no infrastructure to accommodate for critical cases of this virus.

There is no end-game in the present approach that results in most at-risk people not getting Covid-19. That’s the problem.

At best, they’ll get it but just at a rate where they die at an acceptable rate.

By “taking one for the team”, instead, we young, healthy majority can achieve herd immunity quickly — actually helping ensure the elderly are protected.

Cowardice and ignorance is actually preventing us all from protecting our loved ones.

Do the math — healthy/young people don’t generally die or require advanced care. If .1% of 100m (us volunteers) do it in 3 weeks, that is an investment of 100,000 of us — to protect 200m at-risk from future infection and death at 1-10% mortality rates.

> At best, they’ll get it but just at a rate where they die at an acceptable rate.

They’ll save lives by ensuring medical staff can attend to people who would otherwise die of problems that are wholly treatable with modern medicine.

> herd immunity

Let’s do the math. Based on what I have read, it would take infecting 70 percent of the population to reach herd immunity with this virus based on the R0 value of roughly 3. If we let that happen, 0.35-0.7 percent of the population will die. In the U.S., that’s 11,445,000 people in the best case. 10 percent of all infections need to be hospitalized. That’s 32.7 million people requiring medical care at an unpredictable rate. It sounds like you’re suggesting 3 weeks, so let’s roll with that. Here’s the problem: young or old, we can’t handle that. The number of hospital beds is nowhere near close. How do you feel about those numbers?

I waded through a 2 hour long presentation by a dozen doctors at UCSF. One of the things that came up was herd immunity. The epidemiologist basically said herd immunity won't happen for this virus because r0 is too high.

My thought is people that think herd immunity would be a couple of week long thing have no idea what they are talking about and are working from a place of denial. Consider MERS, MERS is still around and they're playing whack a mole with it. Let COVID19 run free and it'll become endemic.

You’re probably right. It’s like they’re not even really digesting the numbers I and at least one other person have put in front of them. There’s some extreme cognitive dissonance going on if they really think that the results of just unleashing this in force on the population are really the same whether you do it all at once or spread it out over an arbitrary period. These are not fiscal installment payments, and we can’t just wave a magic wand and suddenly make our healthcare system capable of handling it over night.

After thinking about it for a moment, I really hope you’re right, because the alternatives just make me sad.

How about the people that you buy food and gasoline from out in west texas? Just collateral damage?

Nobody knows what long term effects of COVID-19 are. Those who recover still end up with reduced lung capacity. Plus this virus also attacks heart and liver, possibly leaving permanent damage to these organs.

And intestines.

Video the other day from a doctor said they were wearing PPE full time now because they were seeing patients with no complaints except GI issues and they saw lung fluid in the X-rays and tested them.

First off, ~12% of hospitalizations here in Canada are people under 40. It's not a laughing matter even for the young and healthy. Secondly it's causing severe damage to your body which could manifest as permanent damage, or just as having expended some of your limited capacity for self repair, leading to earlier failure in old age. Nothing is for free.

If you're deliberately getting people infected for herd immunity, you actually speed up the spread to all manner of people, including the most vulnerable. And you make the burden on the limited health system all the more acute causing additional unnecessary loss of life. Remember you need something like 50-80% of people infected to achieve herd immunity. Just doing the math on that and the burden to the medical system - it's not pretty.

I've given this some thought, but I think it's a horrible idea.

Then, we’re “flattening the curve”, infecting old and infirm people for 6 months, until a vaccine is ready.

That’s the plan.

That’s a bad plan.

There's not going to be a good plan. The good plan set sail in early January when we didn't consider SARS-CoV-2 a serious concern. So now we're choosing between flattening the curve to mitigate the overall death toll, or ignoring the moral cost and having 2.5m Americans die. I'm pretty sure where I stand on this.

And a vaccine won't be ready in 6 months. 12-18 is more like it, though we might be lucky and stumble upon a treatment to the disease itself.

In addition, remember that we’re effectively testing nobody. The only young people seen in hospital with Covid-19 are probably the “tip of the iceberg” — this is the tiny portion that has serious issues. What is says is: there are 10x? 100x as many with Covid-19, exhibiting minor symptoms. Which may be a blessing in disguise.

I think, when we finally see any statistcally significant sampling including antibody tests, we may be pleasantly surprised at our progress toward herd immunity.

We have no good information presently.

The problem with this virus is that it doesn't adequately select people with your attitude out of the population. You probably won't die. You'll just spread it and cause lots of other people die. Which is why it's so hard for public health officials to get traction. If people individually were afraid of dying then it would be easy. But it requires an act of care for someone beyond yourself to respond properly to this, and a lot of people just don't have the maturity to do that.

Now, it's possible that you do have the maturity but you're misinformed. Herd immunity the way you are suggesting does not get us through in two to three weeks. It's a full year of new waves sweeping through the population and millions dead in the USA, hundreds of millions around the world. And that assumes it doesn't mutate enough to bypass the immunity of those who have had it. Vaccination is the only way out, just like it with flu. We have been spared a flu pandemic by a combination of luck and massive monitoring and vaccination.

> stands a good chance of seriously damaging or destroying our civilization.

Where do people get this idea? The fastest path out with the least damage is full isolation and quarantine. There's a great line from epidemiologists: "If we could wave a magic wand and freeze everyone on Earth six feet apart for two weeks, this would be over." China is resuming operations. It's places that aren't responding well, like Iran or the USA, that are going to drive the world's suffering in this.

And let us be clear, the response in the USA has been utterly appalling. Speaking as someone who did his graduate work in infectious disease, the only question about Donald Trump's legacy is whether he will be remembered as the worst president the USA has ever had, or the second worse. It depends on whether you feel that intentional genocide (Andrew Jackson) or willful incompetence is worse.

I know that math can be challenging for some, but I'll try to help you through this. Say we follow the Kundert Methodology. Intentionally get 100M people in the US sick in over 2-3 weeks. Of those, approximately 15% are requiring hospital care. 15M people. Guess how many hospital beds we have in the US? According to the American Hospital Association, we have roughly 900k beds. So 14.1M patients aren't treated. Not good. Leads to complications, and a higher fatality rate. Additionally, 5% of those infected require ICU. That's 5M patients. We don't have the capacity to handle 10% of those cases. Because we've crashed our medical system, 4.5M Americans just died.

So at the end of the day we have the following:

4.5M dead. 500k with long term health issues

And this ignores the fact that we wouldn't be able to keep at risk "and any scared people" in a safe isolation. Inevitably, a decent percentage of them would get infected and have worse results.

Yes, apparently math can be challenging. Healthy young people with no underlying health issues are at very low risk. South of .1% mortality.

The arguments given apply exactly to the presently executed plan, just over a year’s duration. During which time, 75% of businesses will be extinguished.

Good luck with that plan, hinging on keeping the elderly and those with health issues isolated for a year. I’m sort of sickened to imagine the horrific outcomes of the current plan to isolate millions of unprepared city-dwellers....

But, I guess that’s not our problem?

Healthy young people with no underlying health issues (kind of redundant). So sorry about those with diabetes. 33% of the US population (100M) had diabetes in 2017. So that's just too bad. How about obesity? According to the CDC, 40% of people age 20-39 are obese. Sucks to be them. Same with cancer patients, smokers, anyone with a compromised immune system.

Your plan is simply immoral. The facts show that it would lead to immense loss of life, while we can simultaneously help business stay afloat. And most economists agree that the economy should be a secondary consideration to the health battle.

Healthy young people with no underlying health issues are at very low risk of dying if they can get medical care. If we run out of hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators, the death rate climbs. If we run out of doctors and nurses to care for the hospitalized patients because they're all home sick with COVID-19, the death rate climbs. The death rate isn't a static feature of the disease, it's a function of how well we can care for the ill.

This comment is encouraging and promoting self harm.

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