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Comment by ranDOMscripts | Hacker News Reader

HN hive mind: At what point are there sufficient numbers of survivors to establish herd immunity and get some semblance of normalcy?

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I think we need to shoot for "a new normal" where better cultural germ control practices are a more normal part of the world.

In which case, we don't need to shoot for herd immunity. We just need to shoot for "Hey, stupid, don't do stuff like blow your nose at the restaurant table or conference table, good god."

Or: “Don’t show up at the office sick, you’re not ‘dedicated’, you’re just an asshole.”

I always wondered about this. For COVID, the recommendation is that you have to be symptom free for 14 days before you are considered not contagious. Adding another 7-10 days of actual disease, you will be asking people to take 21-24 days off for a disease ? That is simply not accepted in American corporate culture, where many mothers return to work 2 weeks after giving birth

Then we need to start accepting it. Those that don't will be the assholes who kill their employees and co-workers. Legislating sick time off, like every other developed country in the world and many that aren't, is what we really need to do. Along with healthcare for everyone. But it all starts by not accepting the assholes at the office trying to kill you as normal.

Realistically, I mean symptomatic (coughing and sneezing). It’s not perfect but people are typically most contagious while they have symptoms.

Plus, when you don’t need bed rest, you can still do any work that can reasonably be done from a remote location. Most companies haven’t done much to push that boundary in the past, and that’s a good idea, but it’s not a complete solution by any means.

Are there any studies that prove that asymptomatic people are less contagious ?

Filed under "People I would like to slap, except it involves touching them."

Yeah.

But in order to enforce that, we need different sick leave and health care policies and ...stuff.

And that's very much a world I would like to see born of this mess, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes.

That’s really the only hope I’m clinging to at this point, that over the next hundred-plus years the cultural changes might be worth all the damage.

Let's shoot for a five year time frame for some major cultural changes and I'm in.

Let's start on fostering them today. If we jump on it, we could flatten the curve with less economic pain this very year.

That ship may have sailed, unfortunately.

Let's build another.

The threshold is 1 - 1 / R_0 [1]. Using the commonly quoted R_0 ~ 2.5, that's 60%. The highest estimate I've seen is R_0 ~ 5.7 [2], in which case more than 80% of the population would need to be immune.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics

[2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article

At about 60-80% immunity you gain herd immunity and the expected infection chain length is less than 2.

The people talking about herd immunity are talking about 60% to 70% of the population having had, and survived, covid-19.

The trouble is how to achieve that without killing 10% of everyone over 50, or anyone with comorbidities.

I remember reading 70%.

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