[hammock]

Well, we could get to 2MM faster if we opened everything up for the less-vulnerable populations (i.e. everyone under 50 without obesity or heart conditions) for whom the survival rate is above 99.99%. You might then be looking at 500k a day rather than 50k.

[meowzero]

That is a good strategy. Unfortunately, ppl with survival rate above 99.99% might live with more vulnerable population. It'll be difficult to figure out how to effectively quarantine the more vulnerable population away from the less-vulnerable.

[guscost]

Why not allow healthy people to inoculate with a reasonable dose of the virus so they can control the timing, and then self-quarantine? I would have done that months ago if it was allowed. Even if it only has a partial chance of conferring immunity, doing that would have helped fewer vulnerable people get sick, but instead public health authorities are still clinging to “informed consent” nonsense, as if turning the world upside-down isn’t another serious risk to mitigate.

[emodendroket]

Maybe I'm missing something but it seems like you're just independently inventing the concept of a vaccine.

[casefields]

Or a Pox Party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pox_party

Not that outrageous.

[nradov]

Jail inmates in California did that in an attempt to get released.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/11/us/california-inmates-coronav...

[emodendroket]

Who's stopping you from doing that? Pretty much all the restrictions are on the honor system so if you think that's a good idea go ahead.

[guscost]

The restrictions prevent me from buying a reasonable dose at the store. How am I supposed to do it, go around licking bus seats? I don’t know anyone positive in town, and asking in public forums has not gotten results.

[nradov]

Travel is still way down. There are many vacant hotel rooms.

[hammock]

Why the massive downvotes?

[hcknwscommenter]

Because no demographic has been demonstrated to have a 99.99% survival rate?

[jwlake]

Source? 0-4 and 5-17 are definitely that high. The 18-45 demo is different, but there's a lot more heterogeneity in that population as well.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

[hcknwscommenter]

I cannot fathom how your link could possibly support your contention that 0-4 and 5-17 are "definitely" a 99.99% survival rate (IFR of 0.01% or 1 fatality out of every 10,000 infections). I suspect you are misreading the table? Care to elaborate?

[elcritch]

Taking the data from the linked table for say 35-44 year olds is 1,798 deaths out of ~43 million population bracket, excluding influenza cases. That’s a 99.9956% survival rate. Taking all covid-19 and influenza it’s still a 99.9903% survival rate.

[lostdog]

Nope, you're not even close to calculating the survival rate correctly. The population of ~43 million is the entire population, not the set of people who were infected.

[rednerrus]

How about this one: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27597.pdf?

[rimliu]

I think in Italy they had 100% for 10-19 bracket.

[em500]

In the Netherlands it's 100% for the 0-14 bracket. 1 out of of the 6500 deaths so far was younger than 25 (he was in the 15-19 bracket).

[mcguire]

Are you seriously suggesting we lock over 110,000,000 people (34% of the population) in close quarantine for the duration? How do you plan to feed them? Get them medical care (be sure you don't overwhelm the system with the under 50s that get sick)? Keep them from rioting against their captors?

What happens when you decide it's good enough and release them, and the residual infection sweeps through that population like wildfire?

[hammock]

>Are you seriously suggesting we lock over 110,000,000 people (34% of the population) in close quarantine for the duration?

As opposed to 100% of the population? It sounds like an improvement to me. I'm suggesting relaxing restrictions for a part of the population, not increasing them.

[xadhominemx]

Who is suggesting 100% of the population be under close quarantine? We haven’t seen anything like that since April.

[sfblah]

Bay area resident here. My kids can't go to school. I barely go to the store. Even going for a walk is tricky, as unless you take massive precautions (which I'm fine with, btw) everyone yells at you. I basically have no human contact outside my family, and it's been like this for six months. So, yeah, for me the situation couldn't really get much more quarantined.

[mcguire]

The Bay area sounds excessive, but consider that under the ancestor's idea, you couldn't do that if you were concerned with reducing your risk of infection.

I'm 53. I have asthma and I really hate hospitals. Right now, I have been going for groceries about once a week. I've gone to some appointments, but I've cancelled others. I've been getting take-out some, and I even went on one shopping expedition for craft supplies. I'm relatively comfortable with that because, while I have to assume everyone else is potentially infected, I can also assume that most of them are taking steps to protect me---a mask is significantly more effective at preventing spread from someone infected than it is at preventing an infection of the wearer.

Close quarantine means no going to the store at all. Not going for walks. It specifically means no human contact outside the people you are quarantined with.

[xadhominemx]

That doesn’t sound like close quarantine at all

[mcguire]

If you think 100% of the population of the United States is in quarantine now, I suggest you check the definition of quarantine.

If you relax "restrictions" on a part of the population, more of that population becomes infected. If you do not increase the restrictions on the remainder of the population, the higher prevalence increases the transmission rate in that remainder. And thus deaths.

I'm sorry if my existence is inconveniencing you.

[majormajor]

You would have to increase restrictions for the vulnerable group because if you allow them to mix at all (even at today's levels) with the "free spreading" group they are going to have much worse odds than they do today. Since you're intentionally trying to increase the proportion of sick people in the less-vulnerable group. People like the "grandma living with family with school age children" or the "30 year old immunocompromised cancer patient with a roommate" get fucked if all those people around them (and around them, etc) simply go back to normal and you don't more actively isolate them.

This might not be a terrible idea, though, if compared to a several-year-extension of what we have now... because over time, the cumulative probably of exposure for the vulnerable will just keep rising and rising if we stay at something like the status quo.

But... that's where things like vaccine and treatment development come in. If a vaccine makes catching it much less likely in 6 months, or treatment improvements make it much less deadly even for the vulnerable in six months, then it's worth spending another 6 months in the current situation.

[nradov]

No one is seriously suggesting we forcibly lock vulnerable people in close quarantine. Instead we should provide those at greatest risk with free hotel rooms if they want to quarantine on a voluntary basis.

[mcguire]

Where they would have to stay. For the duration. With minimal contact. If they don't want to take a significant chance of dying.

[goalieca]

This is roughly what is called for here by some of the leading experts: https://gbdeclaration.org/

[regularfry]

These are not "some of the leading experts". https://www.wired.co.uk/article/great-barrington-declaration...

[goalieca]

Wired? Seriously? I don’t even trust them for tech news.

Here are the authors. They are well credentialed

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.

Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.

[regularfry]

And I'm sure at some point one of them is going to publish an epidemiological model in support of their position, and not a press release. Until then, they're not even at Wired's level.

[myk9001]

Here's a published epidemiological model that supports Kulldorff, Gupta, and Bhattacharya position. Though the author is not one of them. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/peerReview?id=10.1...

One of the authors' twitter thread with the paper's summary: https://twitter.com/WesPegden/status/1288140129677332482

[regularfry]

That paper doesn't consider reinfection risk or non-fatal outcomes.

There are many problems with the GBD, but the simplest is that we don't know who the high-risk groups are. Yes, we know age and certain categories of pre-existing condition make for higher risk of death. But we also know that perfectly healthy young people end up with strokes, heart damage, and lung damage, and we're not really sure why. We don't know why some people end up with debilitating symptoms months after infection.

We don't even know if herd immunity is actually possible, or if we'd be committing ourselves to years of intermittent lockdown controls as local outbreaks come and go.

This paper is a similar (if slightly more mathematically detailed) approach, and is more recent: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/21/2008087117. It comes to the opposite conclusion. What they find is that while it's technically possible to achieve herd immunity this way, it's logistically unfeasible. It needs monitoring, compliance, and reactiveness that we demonstrably can't (or won't) implement - if we could, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Besides which, neither this paper nor that supports any idea that these three are "leading experts". As far as I can see they're vocal and have a history of being proved wrong by events.