[daxfohl]

Anybody else feeling like if we're young and healthy we should actively try to contract this thing, self-isolate for a few weeks, and be done with it?

It feels almost like this would be the most socially responsible thing to do: reduce the effective R0 and allow things to start getting back to normality.

I'm the farthest thing from a "reopen" protester. But I can't help thinking that as a young and healthy individual, this is a valid option that nobody is talking about.

[SeeTheTruth]

NO. You risk spreading it, young and healthy people are still dying or having severe outcomes - we still don't know enough to predict how it will go.

And we still don't know if catching one strain once confers immunity, or for how long. So you won't be "done with it".

If you do get sick you become a burden on an overloaded healthcare system.

The people talking about this option are rightly being shut down.

[twunde]

To reiterate NO! Something that's not talked about enough is that the coronavirus is causing neurological issues[1]. The full effects aren't known, but examples of neurological diseases are MS, Parkinson's and cerebral palsy. That's not something to want to voluntarily get. oh, and that's not to mention that you're likely to get lung scarring or have a long-term cough[2]. The survivors will have major long-term complications.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2... [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-som...

[nosuchthing]

+ Kidney issues.

Kidney failure could explain the swelling of feet, cardiac issues, and strokes being observed in Covid-19 infected cases.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v...

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/22/health/strokes-coronaviru...

[Eric_WVGG]

And blood clotting, strokes in the 30-40 age set, including one youngish actor who had a leg amputated.

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21244171/stroke-coronavirus-sym...

[rimliu]

These effects are not specific to COVID and are common with severe ilnesses caused by viruses.

[daxfohl]

But what is the plan? We can't sit around for five years until there is a vaccine. By then we'll all have caught it anyway. Nevermind that food supply chain will have dried up way before then and nobody will have a job anymore. Even with my posh job at a big cloud provider, I can't imagine the public still caring about any new feature dev if this goes on more than a year, so bye bye "recession proof" job. I can't imagine many other jobs surviving much more than that. That is as much of a non plan as an unmitigated reopen.

I just don't think that works. I think we're going to have to end up making some hard choices about acceptable risk, and how we can use that to get to a better outcome.

[icelancer]

>> But what is the plan?

There isn't one. Government has done little to nothing with the time they bought with our sacrifices. Mostly this is due to the fact there isn't a lot TO do - getting the hundreds of millions of tests that people want so some large percentage of the country can be tested daily is impossible anytime soon due to raw materials/resources.

Governments release plans to reopen that don't feature a single metric that holds them accountable, much less anything resembling open source / open data that drives their decisions. They bastardize the word "science" as something they are theoretically being guided by. The first tenets of science are transparency, open data, and falsifiability. No plan put forth by a state fits these criteria.

Anyone who points this out on Hacker News is downvoted massively, as you are undoubtedly noticing. As someone on Twitter very aptly put it, the Slack/Zoom/WFH class is more than happy to act sanctimonious about the whole thing while unemployment marches on to 20%.

EDIT:

>> making some hard choices about acceptable risk

People are bad at evaluating risk. Think about all the "Project Zero" slogans out there - no deaths from not wearing a seatbelt, no cancer deaths, no XYZ, no accepting risk of contracting COVID-19 until we get a perfect vaccine, etc. All completely unattainable. But if you point that out or try to have a conversation about it, someone swings down from the top rope with a story about how their grandma died of COVID-19 or that one young person somewhere died of it or had permanent scarring of their lungs (nevermind the statistics showing median age of death from COVID-19 being extremely high and the reproducibility of the lung damage being quite poor) and then you get massively booed and sometimes doxxed/reported to your employer.

It's politically untenable to talk about risk, hence a bunch of halfcocked "plans" of locking everyone in their houses to hide from the virus. We went from "don't overwhelm hospitals" to justifying layoffs/furloughs in hospitals nationwide by saying "oh you want to reopen? well volunteer your grandma to get it first" pretty quickly.

If people were good about evaluating risk, we wouldn't have the lottery fund education, for example.

[daxfohl]

We're fucked aren't we.

I'd never thought it all the way through until last night. But I don't see how we make it though this without something on par with the Great Depression.

Right now Microsoft and Amazon have this little bump due to WFH and stockpiling, giving tech workers reason for hope, but that'll start fading soon and they'll go down with everyone else.

It's the whole boiling frog parable really, isn't it.

    * Some virus in China: no big deal it's China.
    * Some virus here: no big deal it'll blow over.
    * Lots of virus here: no big deal we'll WFH for a while.
    * "A while" is up and more virus: no big deal we'll keep WFH.
    * Unemployment is 6M/wk: no big deal look at AMZN/MSFT.
    * Pork processing plant shuts down: no big deal there's other food.
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
      ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
      This should scare the shit out of everyone still living.

Why do we think that in two years, we'll still have enough of a supply chain that vaccine development can continue unimpeded?

People talk about a V-shaped recovery, but I think we're very close to the tipping point. This depends on the existence of expendable pocket money for the public, an existing supply chain, and stable cash flow. All of this will be gone in about two months. If we're stuck with this for two years? There will be no product to buy, nobody to buy it, and no infrastructure to build it. Home values will drop, people will default, and the whole country from NY to SF to Dubuque will look like Detroit of 2008 or worse, cities and suburbs alike, but there won't be a "not-Detroit" of investors to come and fix things this time. Most of us who are young, intelligent tech workers living through a 13-year boom cycle have a hard time understanding this.

Not looking forward to this. The lone bright spot, China (assuming they're able to keep things in check) starts hiring the brightest from around the world, and that's how this empire ends.

[icelancer]

The main difference here is that the Fed is refusing to fail. They have acquired more assets in 45 days than they did for the entirety of any single QE period. With nominal rates in the gutter and the appetite for US debt still high, the Fed will print, and print, and print. Asset class will get bailed out regularly.

People think this has a major negative impact on the national debt, and while it's somewhat concerning, it's really not that much of an issue as long as people want our debt that we denominate in our own currency.

The problem is that populism will continue grow unchecked as the asset classes are bailed out and their assets are propped up and backstopped by the Fed, while the common man gets a smaller and smaller share of the bailout funds. Politicians will quite rightly point this out and will use it as a lever in their campaigns. If it all sounds familiar... well, the man currently in office is an expert at that angle.

That doesn't mean we aren't fucked. I am merely saying that it's pretty unclear what the future holds, as evidenced by the stock market's precarious position.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

The problem with that is, as far as I know, that:

- COVID puts even some of the young and healthy into the ICU

- there are reports of serious long term damage even in mild/asymptomatic cases, so you might be immune until the next big pandemic but your lungs may be busted forever

[rimliu]

I doubt there are any report of "serious long term damage even in mild/asymptomatic cases". First, because we simply do not have any data on long term effects for the simple reason that this thing is less than six months old. As for lung damage is it mostly caused by ventilation, not by disease itself. I doubt you get artificial lung ventilation if you got an asymptomatic case.

[helen___keller]

Maybe it's possible that there could be a net positive from a coordinated and well-executed plan that follows this idea in an area with sufficient hospital resources to handle the small percentage of cases that end up severe. That said there are two reasons why this should not and will not happen:

1. Execution - it's not enough to tell the young and healthy "go get coughed on". Intentionally infecting a significant percentage of the population would almost certainly lead to an outbreak in the remaining population unless extreme care was taken. Keep in mind that a bunch of these young people won't have any symptoms at all- and we probably don't have the resources to test all these young people. The outcome would be too predictable- some young people would want to leave home after a week thinking they never got sick, and then would spread the disease to their community.

2. Politics and fairness - who are the ones most incentivized to be intentionally infected? Who are the ones most capable of declining this program and continuing to isolate at home for the next N months as needed?

Any politician who suggests this plan will be accused of sacrificing the poor and the blue collar, as they are the ones who can't just work remotely for the next year.

Personally, as a WFH-capable employee I would sit this out. Why should I go through this when I'm capable of effectively disappearing from society until the pandemic is over? I'm sure many other office workers agree.

Putting these two points together, this is neither something that we should encourage individuals to do of their own right (lest they fuck it up and hurt their community), nor something any politician would (probably) ever try to coordinate and execute at scale.

[cbhl]

It's unclear to me whether you'll catch it again next year (like the seasonal flu), or how long your immunity will last. But if you want to go about this, I'd suggest doing so with medical supervision.

Consider volunteering for a "challenge vaccine trial": https://1daysooner.org/

[gumby]

Young and healthy doesn’t guarantee you’ll survive the disease intact.

[fragmede]

The science is still out. We're not sure that specific individuals will develop an antibody response, though WHO will now go as far as to say "most" and "some level of protection"[0]. We're not sure being young and healthy is enough to guarantee that you won't die from it. We're not sure of the long-term effects of having caught it. Maybe it kills everyone 6 months later. Doubtful, but no one's been alive for 6 months after having caught it.

We still don't know enough about this thing, though we are learning more by the day.

As the magic 8 ball says: ask again tomorrow.

[0] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1254160937805926405

[rimliu]

There is no guarantee that you won't die from the lighting strike. All the numbers show that risk for the young people is extremely low (though not zero), even lower than some other common ilnesses.

[forgot_my_pwd]

This has been my thinking for a few weeks now. Aside from bringing us significantly closer to herd immunity, it would increase the pool of eligible plasma donors for plasma antibody therapy.

And those are just the public health benefits. Saving millions of jobs and livelihoods is no small benefit either.

[danieltillett]

If only it were that simple. Coronavirus only induce a short lived immunity (40 weeks is the average). With the common cold varieties you basically catch the same virus over and over again as you don’t build up any long term immunity to them.

The end result of all this is you would get sick and then be at risk of getting sick again next year and the year after that all the while putting at risk anyone who is vulnerable.

There is really only one way out of this mess - a vaccine.

[arpa]

I don't think we have any data regarding immunity against this particular coronavirus. AFAIR, the nastier the virus, the longer immunity lasts, e.g. SARS, MERS immunity can last up to 3 years.

[danieltillett]

Yes we do (I have to dig out the reference), but it appears to be the same as other Coronaviruses.

You are right that the worse the infection the longer the immunity, but if we are looking at the young they have a mild disease so we should expect a short immune lifetime.

Edit. Have a look at Figure 3 of this pre-print[0]. This doesn’t encourage me that we can expect a long immune lifetime with SARS-CoV-2.

0. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v...

[asdhaslkskdh]

What if this is the new HIV/AIDS?

(I'm no fan of oversimplification, but this is what's at stake.)

[enitihas]

This is far far worse than HIV, as in it is much much harder to avoid being inflected. The difference between the precautions for HIV and for this is night and day.

[droopyEyelids]

This made sense when it seemed like the flu- where you get it, and you die or you get better, end of story.

Sars-2 is you get it, and then you get some amount of permanent damage to your lungs and cardiovascular system.