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Comment by srcreigh | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't someone make the point that 95%+ (or 98%+ etc) of Americans are protected via natural immunity or vaccines and back it up with data?

Once that point is made, the discouraging natural immunity argument can stop because hospitals can't overfill anymore.

However until that point can be made[0] I think the "don't encourage natural immunity" position will prevent the most deaths.

By the way, I also don't condone harassment of unvaccinated people or vaccination as a requirement for employment etc either. Those are separate issues to me.

[0]: I tried looking for it but CDC data is only sept 2021 and estimated only 146M infections https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

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I attempted to make an argument like that 2 weeks ago.

I was using an estimate of 120m instead of the 146 that you quoted. And I'm just a dummy on the internet, so I'm probably at least a little wrong. But the gist was that if you could jab everyone tomorrow (which you can't), you might get a little bit of a benefit in the stats, but politically you'd be dead

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29914681

There's no reason hospitals can't still fill up anyway if you have enough volume.

EDIT: I should mention that I really appreciate what you said above:

> By the way, I also don't condone harassment of unvaccinated people or vaccination as a requirement for employment etc either. Those are separate issues to me.

I'm in Canada where the mandates are quite extensive but also change frequently.

I'd like to think the govt is hoping that each time restrictions are loosed, some type of immunity has developed and restrictionz can be loosed more. When things seem to get worse and worse again, the restrictions are added to ensure hospitals can work.

At the end of the day, a large decrease in severity will be the deciding factor. We can try to model when that will happen, but it will have to actually happen regardless of what the models say.

https://covidestim.org/us has estimates on the percentage of people ever infected by state. I looked at MA, NY, and CA, and they all hover around 80% (with error bars). I can't find a cumulative US estimate.

I have no idea how they came up with the estimate, but the site is maintained by reputable institutions, so I am inclined to believe these numbers unless proven otherwise.

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