Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by service_bus 2271 days ago
Quite possibly the dumbest thing I have ever read on this site.
1 comments

Please substantiate further as to why.
I dunno about dumbest, but this guy is proposing spiking the curve without any evidence or even vague correlation of variolation and mortality in Covid-19.
"The curve" is mostly driven by people who don't know they're infected passing the virus on. People who are deliberately infected and immediately isolated will be much less likely to infect others.

Not to mention, there are many places where healthcare systems are not at capacity, so assuming this approach doesn't change the total long-term number of infected people, it actually flattens the curve to the left. And if they're better-than-average risk candidates, it'll also reduce total medical system use.

There is no evidence yet that immunity is even possible.

Until we know that, taking away healthcare workers, healthcare resources, and having volunteers willing to kill themselves is foolish, at best.

In macaques they found reinfection was not possible.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.990226v1

The news stories about reinfection are suspect because there's a high false positive and false negative rate to the tests.

It's the latest spin on the "herd immunity" meme.