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Comment by hcknwscommenter | Hacker News Reader

It is very positive in that we can be more confident that our assumptions are close to reality. 0.5%*330M still equals 1.65M deaths, or (very roughly) 5M ICU beds. Spread out over 52 weeks, that's a lot of ventilators and ICU beds and PPE, but it is a target. A very big juicy target that we can and should aim directly at, and HIT.

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So having killed 1.6 million in the US alone and run ICU at 100% for a year, you’re just going to hope people remain immune and the virus doesn’t mutate having passed through billions of people worldwide?

The alternative being...? We know that covid-19 will likely mutate, just like other coronaviruses, H1N1 and its mutations are still around every year; are you suggesting we must remain in quarantine until we both create a vaccine for covid-19 and then every fall quarantine until we're able to develop a vaccine for that year's bout of viruses?

It's more or less epidemiologically impossible that you will see an attack rate of 100% (as you just assumed). Once attack rate reaches >40~60%, the reproduction number drops below 1 because there just aren't enough uninfected hosts.

It will probably be significantly higher than 60%, since COVID-19's R0 without lockdown seems to be pretty high. The CDC has estimated it at 5.7 [0]. Herd immunity threshold = 1 - 1/R0, so the threshold would be 82.4%.

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

That R0 assumes we are taking essentially no measures to stop the virus though, right? I don't no much about it but it seems like the R0 would drop significantly if we keep doing social distancing, expand testing, make people wear masks, etc.

It does, but the point of getting to herd immunity is that we don't want to do any of that other stuff.

The 5.7 number comes from wuhan, during lunar new year, and before viral identification.

The issue is you didn’t factor in immunity fading and requiring it again. So those that survive will need to roll dice at a random later date.

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