[__blockcipher__]

Great question. Reaching herd immunity does not cause a virus to stop circulating. It just stops it from spreading exponentially. That’s a common misconception.

What you are referring to is eradication, which has only ever been performed twice. SARS-2 is functionally impossible to eradicate due to its zoonotic origin and incredible spread.

Even with herd immunity SARS-2 is here to stay. That’s not a problem though, even if we could so something about it. Why? Because SARS-2 kills the very old but spares the very young. Therefore once it has passed through the current population, the set of SARS-CoV-2-naive individuals becomes dominated by new entrants to the world, meaning babies/toddlers, the same group that does not die to COVID-19 in any real numbers. Therefore unlike Influenza, recurring deaths from COVID-19 will be incredibly low in subsequent years.

[raphlinus]

As long as we're tossing around citations to the scientific literature which supposedly support our arguments, here's one I'm sure you will enjoy: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v...

[__blockcipher__]

See, they use general human coronaviruses as a model, instead of SARS-1, which is incredibly functionally and structurally similar to SARS-2.

Why would you willfully ignore the enormous research literature showing enduring immunity developing from SARS-1? Oh, right, because either you haven't read it or you don't like that it doesn't support your conclusions.

It's like, imagine we're discussing H1N1 reinfection, and we have a highly similar H1N0 which varies very slightly, and we know that doesn't lead to reinfection. But instead you look at a number of Influenza viruses in the same family but not nearly as similar.

Don't you see how ridiculous that is?

We obviously should use SARS-1 as a model for SARS-2.