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Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

I was writing that we should both create hospital capacity and have some moderate flattening of the curve. Of course we shouldn't let the virus run free.

But unless you are hoping for a vaccine to be invented soon, which would of course be wonderful, you have to face the other scenario and that is that we have to slowly build up herd immunity. Herd immunity means that people have to get infected and a percentage of that will have to go to the hospital. No matter how you manage it, bigger hospital capacity simply means that you are able to reach herd immunity more quickly.

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> Herd immunity

What does her immunity actually mean though? What other diseases do we try to tackle using herd immunity? How many deaths would make herd immunity acceptable or not acceptable?

There are 350m people in the US. We need to get about 60% of them to have had covid-19. That's 210m people. We don't know how fatal covid-19 is yet, so here are some lower numbers:

  0.1% =   210,000 deaths
  0.2% =   420,000 deaths
  0.5% = 1,050,000 deaths

And once we've killed off all these people what have we achieved? Covid-19 would be in the population and will come back every year as a seasonal respiratory illness, killing off more people every year until we get a vaccine.

For context, about 3 million people die each year in the US.

IF (and that's a big if), the infection fatality rate really were just 0.1% (i.e., regular flu), then yeah I think letting this thing run its course is the reasonable thing to do.

In my mind, the reason for the lockdowns is because we don't know the morality rate yet, and so we should be cautious in case it's 1-3% how it was looking at first.

I could turn the question around on you, and ask what fatality rate makes the "run its course" strategy reasonable to you? No deaths?

There are ways to limit the number of deaths and still reach herd immunity. For instance by keeping elderly and sick people isolated but the healthier part not, until herd immunity is reached.

This disease has to be handled with intelligence and common sense, not with rethorics and dogma's.

> Covid-19 would be in the population and will come back every year as a seasonal respiratory illness, killing off more people every year until we get a vaccine.

Do you have any evidence to support that it would keep coming back? As far as I know there's only very small anecdotal evidence of people getting reinfected and we simply have no way of knowing yet whether the average person's immunity will last weeks, months or years.

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