Originally Posted by
samc
So, a few questions. What % of the population in the US needs to be infected for seeking herd immunity to be an effective strategy. Don’t forget we have no vaccine and no consensus that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t reinfect hosts.
If you contact trace effectively (that’s a big IF) and you isolate the the contagious, how long does that delay herd immunity? Don’t you need either a vaccine, exposure, or viral mutation to increase herd immunity?
It looks to me like:
In Jan/Feb
1. We didn’t have reliable nucleic acid tests.
2. We didn’t have reliable antibody tests.
3. We didn’t have enough contact tracers or people to train them.
4. We didn’t know the R0 until weeks after the fact but know it went to 3.9 (6.6 now discovered) at least.
5. We didn’t know if immunity or reinfection was possible.
6. We didn’t know how many asymptomatic transmitters there could be.
7. We didn’t know how many presymptomatic spreaders there could be or were.
8. We couldn’t derive an appropriate population exposure for herd immunity if it even works in this case (which it probably would in the long long run).
So with these uncertainties, you would have enacted your strategy of contact tracing, isolating the contagious, and left inter and intrastate travel open? Concerts ok? Restaurants ok? Parties ok? Packing into trains ok? Force at risk people to go to work or be fired?
Or would you have taken some other action? Why do you assume most of the world acted differently than you would have?
I would have used the same tactics that have ALWAYS been used in previous epidemics. THIS case is the outlier. This has not been done before. And those issues were ALWAYS PRESENT with every previous epidemic. We listened to the Chicken Littles of the world and will pay a terrible price for the shutdown, and I don’t just mean in dollars.
in thevUS alone, three million people a year are diagnosed with a serious cancer. Ultimately we cure (or at least put in remission long enough the patient dies of something else) two-thirds of those people. But for three months nobody was doing Pap smears, mammograms, colonoscopies, and other tests to detect those cancers early, so they will be detected later, when the cancer is more advanced, the surgery/chemotherapy/radiation therapy will be more extreme, and the odds of cure less.
Same sort of thing applies across the board. Stop routine medical diagnosis and care, the cardiovascular disease gets worse, the renal disease gets worse, diabetes... etc. let alone increases in mental illness, child abuse, suicide, domestic violence, etc.
you can’t just count one side of 5he equation, you gotta count both sides.