> This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.
This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.
The trace model: identify each infected person, trace all their contacts, test all of them, expand outwards. Full quarantine the infected. Intensive but it works; see South Korea and New Zealand.
The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million people.
The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million people.
That's current US policy. That's what the "Get and Keep America Open" plan does.[1] Current death rate for the US is around 1,400 per day.
This could be a naive question, but everything I've heard is that coronaviruses don't disappear, they just sorta integrate and mutate into our normal "known set" that we deal with year-to-year.
If that is true, doesn't the strategy taken by SK and NZ put them at continued risk for a another outbreak if the virus sneaks back in? Without a vaccine, and then significant uptake by the population yearly, doesn't the risk of covid-19, and its mutations, come back every year?
This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.