[tropdrop]

> “My biggest concern, flat out, is the sickness is spread by people traveling point to point. It can be reduced by people sheltering in place. We are doing the opposite of that. We are taking people to a location that is vulnerable and ill equipped to handle travelers at this time,” one employee says.

> Van Horn only has a small clinic and hospital, and Hinojos says most patients are sent to El Paso or Odessa if they need serious care.

It's not about the <55 year old employees getting sick. It's about putting an entire rural town at risk of infection from a state with severe infection rates - a town that has no infrastructure to accommodate for critical cases of this virus.

[pjkundert]

There is no end-game in the present approach that results in most at-risk people not getting Covid-19. That’s the problem.

At best, they’ll get it but just at a rate where they die at an acceptable rate.

By “taking one for the team”, instead, we young, healthy majority can achieve herd immunity quickly — actually helping ensure the elderly are protected.

Cowardice and ignorance is actually preventing us all from protecting our loved ones.

Do the math — healthy/young people don’t generally die or require advanced care. If .1% of 100m (us volunteers) do it in 3 weeks, that is an investment of 100,000 of us — to protect 200m at-risk from future infection and death at 1-10% mortality rates.

[CSSer]

> At best, they’ll get it but just at a rate where they die at an acceptable rate.

They’ll save lives by ensuring medical staff can attend to people who would otherwise die of problems that are wholly treatable with modern medicine.

> herd immunity

Let’s do the math. Based on what I have read, it would take infecting 70 percent of the population to reach herd immunity with this virus based on the R0 value of roughly 3. If we let that happen, 0.35-0.7 percent of the population will die. In the U.S., that’s 11,445,000 people in the best case. 10 percent of all infections need to be hospitalized. That’s 32.7 million people requiring medical care at an unpredictable rate. It sounds like you’re suggesting 3 weeks, so let’s roll with that. Here’s the problem: young or old, we can’t handle that. The number of hospital beds is nowhere near close. How do you feel about those numbers?

[Gibbon1]

I waded through a 2 hour long presentation by a dozen doctors at UCSF. One of the things that came up was herd immunity. The epidemiologist basically said herd immunity won't happen for this virus because r0 is too high.

My thought is people that think herd immunity would be a couple of week long thing have no idea what they are talking about and are working from a place of denial. Consider MERS, MERS is still around and they're playing whack a mole with it. Let COVID19 run free and it'll become endemic.

[CSSer]

You’re probably right. It’s like they’re not even really digesting the numbers I and at least one other person have put in front of them. There’s some extreme cognitive dissonance going on if they really think that the results of just unleashing this in force on the population are really the same whether you do it all at once or spread it out over an arbitrary period. These are not fiscal installment payments, and we can’t just wave a magic wand and suddenly make our healthcare system capable of handling it over night.

After thinking about it for a moment, I really hope you’re right, because the alternatives just make me sad.