As France reopens, just 4.4% of population infected by coronavirus | Hacker News Reader

As France reopens, just 4.4% of population infected by coronavirus

medicalxpress.com

14 pointspseudolus10 comments

This article is based on a false premise it makes very early: "[scientists] note that in the absence of a vaccine, the only way out of the pandemic is through herd immunity".

No, scientists do not note that. The clear consensus is that you reduce the number of cases down to the capacity of your contact tracing capability and you use quarantine to shut down local outbreaks. China, South Korea, Australia... what do you think they are doing?

Letting the virus go wild among the population to establish "herd immunity" is nobody's idea of a good time. Are 70% of people under the age of 50? Is it ok to kill 0.2% of the country? Even if you don't die, what is it like to have Covid? Are you even immune after having it? Nobody is seriously considering letting the virus loose.

Western Australia currently has nobody in hospital with Covid, and restrictions are significantly easing on Monday. Their rate of immunity is basically zero and they seem to be doing just fine.

^ herd immunity is a 19th century solution to a pandemic.

So the message is that the lockdown is a failure, the only way it could help if it is maintained until there is a vaccine.

Good luck with that!

That's the message you are reading. The lockdown brought precious times for supply chains to start relocating, for cosmetic industries to start producing hydro-alcoholic gel, for hospitals to enter crisis mode without the staff burning out too fast, for legislators to discuss emergency measures, etc.

All these things helped France prepare for the lockdown measures lifting, and most likely saved lives.

No country except Sweden is setting a goal of reaching herd immunity. Reaching herd immunity is a failure in itself, it means a good fraction of the population will die (whether the hospitals are overloaded or not).

Herd immunity is absolutely not a failure. The point is to have young healthy people get the virus who will neither die, nor require hospitalization. Once this population has substantial immunity, risk drops drastically for the at risk people.

> The point is to have young healthy people get the virus who will neither die, nor require hospitalization.

This is a novel virus that is not entirely understood yet. Maybe the majority of these young healthy people would not die (only 0.2%, and I wish you won't be one of them), but they might get serious complications that will accompany them for the rest of their lives. Maybe they will be more subject to strokes, lung failures, etc. later in life. Maybe the virus won't kill them now but reduce their life expectancy by 10 years. How does that sound?

> How does that sound?

It sounds hypothetical. You said herd immunity involves a good fraction of the population dying which you don't know. Serious complications for the non-risk population is neither known nor expected.

> You said herd immunity involves a good fraction of the population dying which you don't know

It's well-known by now that even the low-risk population (<50 age group) still has a 0.x% risk of dying directly from covid. It's insane that people are still minimising this.

> Serious complications for the non-risk population is neither known nor expected.

1) it's "low-risk". "No-risk" is for the 0-20 age group, and they are not enough to provide herd immunity.

2) here is one known and documented complication for young people affected with covid.

Doctors Link COVID-19 To Potentially Deadly Blood Clots And Strokes https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/29/8479170...

There is not enough data yet to infer on long-term complications yet. But doctors are definitely monitoring this.

for what it is worth, I believe it is a 0.0X% chance of dying for < 50. Alternatively put, x/10,000.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/12/scie...

The supply chains have alcohol gel so they can clean the people who are going to get infected anyway? These are all a bunch of far fetched excuses for the fact that unless you can afford to wait for a vaccine or treatment, you can’t protect people from corona. You can only waste a lot of money on delaying it.

This might have been less obvious back then but it surely should be glaringly obvious now. It’s just hard to admit when you’ve just wasted billions on a failure.

By the way the big ‘failure’ of Sweden is now further along the road to immunity and had less people dying per million than the great ‘success’ of France.

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