| We have talked about “pull off the bandaid”- to have 200M people get the disease means we’re going to lose somewhere between 1-2M people (just in the US). Doing that quickly means hospitals and morgues overflowing with dead from COVID. We HAVE talked about this from the beginning - this is the point of “flattening the curve”. If we let a million Americans die in a short time, it’ll tank the economy and overwhelm our healthcare system and ability to treat not only this disease but all others at the same time. It’d be one thing if we were testing and tracing to try and limit. But this YOLO strategy is a recipe for complete chaos. Even more inportantly: we don’t understand the long term impacts for those who survive. What is the 5-year mortality rate from complications? The US DOD has already decided that COVID infection disqualifies you for future military service (ostensibly because of the lung complications, but they haven’t said why formally yet). The YOLO strategy that some folks are proposing is insane given how much we don’t know about this disease. It would be like proposing in 1982 that we get everyone infected with AIDS so we had “herd immunity”. Think about how that would have worked out for us... and then tell me that it’s a good idea to do it this time. There may be a time when we know enough to make smart risk decisions about this disease, but less than 6 months after emergence isn’t it. |
IF a few things are true:
1. The population being infected matches the demographics of the US as a whole. If the population is instead "healthy people under 60", IIRC the deaths go from 1-2M to 10-20k.
2. There is no way to infect someone deliberately in a way that reduces death rates. Variolation [0] has worked in the past, and is a possibility here. If it provides an additional factor of 10 safety benefit, you could now estimate 1-2k deaths, down from 1-2 million.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation