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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

As I've said for months, the sooner we get to herd immunity, the better.

The US literally can't do testing and tracing to save their own lives. Yet people still pretend otherwise, like the tulip or bitcoin manias.

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If we need 70% of the US population to get infected to reach herd immunity, and COVID has an infection fatality rate of .05%; this will kill about 1.2 Million people.

I, for one, am hopeful that we can get through this without that many deaths.

Recent studies have shown that covid antibodies disappear very quickly in a fairly high percentage of positive cases.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/studies-report-ra...

Those have been discredited as not measuring all immune components.

HN readers: there is no conclusive science behind anything reported about COVID-19.

Thus proving the point that we can't expect herd immunity until there is valid evidence for it.

Then we should just treat it like a tough flu season.

Except it's far worse than any flu season in recent history in the US, there aren't any treatment options or their immature, but yea...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but they've never found a treatment for the flu, right? You get it, you tough it out. At least I've never been cured of a flu, despite many, many flu shots.

Nope, the absence of evidence doesn't support anything that you say.

Also, lockdown just kicks the can down the road in the US. Even welding doors shut like in Wuhan just means the epidemic continues after the lockdown ends. Ad nauseum until herd immunity.

That's not how absence of evidence works. You're the one making the claim of herd immunity - not me. And also disrupting that claim, with:

> HN readers: there is no conclusive science behind anything reported about COVID-19.

[correction .05% -> .5% deleted]

Yes, you are correct. I meant .5% IFR

> Yet people still pretend otherwise, like the tulip or bitcoin manias.

America's lack of testing is like Bitcoin? What an amusing and irrelevant example.

What evidence do we have that infection confers immunity?

How do you recover from a virus if not by becoming immune to it? Immune here in the sense of being able to fight it, not in the sense of being unaffected (the letter will clearly not happen, nor does it need to).

Ok, how long does that immunity last? Is it forever? Is it two months? Can we actually achieve herd immunity or would we be signing up for a reinfection merry-go-round?

1) Every disease in history has conferred immunity except for HIV, which is chronic.

2) What is your alternative? The US lost to mother nature.

Yes, but the question is how long that immunity lasts for.

Not all diseases provide immunity forever.

> Every disease in history has conferred immunity except for HIV, which is chronic.

This is not true, nor a generally good guideline to think about things. Coronaviruses generally confer short immunity periods.

> 2) What is your alternative? The US lost to mother nature.

In the very least, being aware that long term herd immunity is not a viable goal.

> This is not true, nor a generally good guideline to think about things. Coronaviruses generally confer short immunity periods.

would the common cold be a good example? the common cold is caused by a few different coronaviruses, and it's not uncommon for people to get a cold at least once a year or even multiple times a year.

You're right, every disease we catch gives us complete immunity. That's why when you catch the flu once, you're immune to it forever.

I'm being sardonic here because you have a severe misunderstanding of how immunity and our immune system actually works. Some diseases (like the chicken pox) we never truly beat, it just becomes latent. Other diseases we only become briefly immune.

> That's why when you catch the flu once, you're immune to it forever.

Each flu season, a new strain appears.

Get your facts straight.

I do not want to contract the virus at all if I can help it, herd immunity be damned.

That's not an option in the US.

Even if there was a vaccine tomorrow, there's a lot of anti-vaxers in this country.

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