No, Covid 19 is not an old person problem

medium.com

3 points·simonebrunozzi··3 comments

This seems to mischaracterize "herd immunity," which as a concept doesn't characterize the method of immunization. Infection is one way; vaccination is another; there's maternal; there's mutation [0].

Should the entire population be infected (what some ignorant idiots call “herd immunity”)

From PubMed [1]: "Herd immunity exists when sufficient numbers of animals in a group or population have immunity against an agent such that the likelihood of an effective contact between diseased and susceptible individuals is reduced."

0. https://www.livescience.com/9983-immune-hiv.html

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31590904/

I couldn't really find a single good argument put forth anywhere in the article that this is indeed "Not an old person problem." So in a sense Nassim has deftly used proof by contrapositive to prove that indeed Covid-19 is an old person problem, i.e. that if the best arguments are shitty then the purported proof is negated.

I'm not sure whether the last sentence was already in the article when it was discussed here (and two earlier posts on HN). It reads: "Why is it so difficult to grasp that by killing seniors, you reduce your own life expectancy?"

So for me, the article is not so much about how the numbers in the current pandemic play out. It's about how society treats their 'weak', because each of us could become one of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com