Assuming patients can't get reinfected with the virus, then herd immunity will definitely work. But for herd immunity to occur, a very large portion of the her

Assuming patients can't get reinfected with the virus, then herd immunity will definitely work. But for herd immunity to occur, a very large portion of the herd needs to get infected. And I would assume that proportion is greater, the more infectious a disease is. The idea with the lockdowns is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that hospitals can handle the influx of cases.