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Comment by maccam94 | Hacker News Reader

Most people in the US who have contracted COVID-19 don't have proof of it. Vaccinating everyone is cheaper and more consistent than trying to build out mass testing infrastructure. Plus if you can convince people to show up for a test, it's better to just vaccinate them. Tests can come back negative, or give false positives, in which case those people still won't have immunity, but the benefits of the vaccine are pretty well understood. AFAIK it's more of an issue of ensuring public safety and efficiency than whether your immune system produced good enough antibodies from an infection.

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The Red Cross and the regional blood bank in my area both test for COVID19 antibodies. Seems extremely unrealistic that testing infrastructure would be too difficult considering how much we've done for the pandemic. "Just jab everyone and we're done!" sounds like a desire for a simple silver bullet solution, which is a very common Silicon Valley way of seeing the world.

Equating antibody presence to be the same as having been vaccinated would give health officials a much more accurate view of the pandemic and where resources need to be allocated instead of this odd ideologically driven need to demand conformity from everyone even if they already have immunity that appears to be an order of magnitude more durable than the jab. It makes clear that this is almost entirely about a pathological need to round off all the corners in the world and almost nothing at all about fighting the pandemic itself. But what a wonderful opportunity this pandemic has been for the authoritarian types. For them, this truly is the golden age and should be extended for as long as possible.

The Red Cross has ~7 million donors per year (~2% of the population). That's not really evidence that they could sample a large enough portion of the population as quickly as they could be vaccinated. And again, it doesn't increase herd immunity. It does at least have a side benefit of increasing our blood inventory, but also has the downside of potentially spreading infection among the unvaccinated while they donate.

> Most people in the US who have contracted COVID-19 don't have proof of it.

There have been over 45 million laboratory-confirmed COVID cases in the US. Basically all of these people can easily prove that they were infected and recovered by showing a copy of their positive result.

For those who believe they had a past infection that wasn't lab-confirmed, antibody testing costs around $50[1].

I'm sure some people will say "but lab results can easily be faked!", which is true. But the CDC cards for the vaccines aren't exactly forgery-proof either.

> AFAIK it's more of an issue of ensuring public safety...

To protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated? And how? Vaccinated individuals can get breakthrough infections and spread the virus to others too. And you could make the argument that some vaccinated individuals, overconfident in the protection they have, will engage in riskier behavior (having close contact with others, not wearing masks, visiting poorly-ventilated indoor spaces, etc.).

[1] https://www.labcorp.com/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/individ...

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