4 ms·

Herd immunity isn't a pipe dream it is just one hell of a sacrifice. And we'd better check the immunity actually lasts before we try that. Frankly I've never be

Herd immunity isn't a pipe dream it is just one hell of a sacrifice. And we'd better check the immunity actually lasts before we try that. Frankly I've never been a great fan of the 'flatten the curve' explanation, sure the graphs seem nice but I reckon the peak in those graphs is drawn too low by several orders of magnitude. In the Netherlands a fatality rate of 0.5% would mean it'd take about a year for herd immunity to kick in assuming we managed sustain the peak that occurred about 2 weeks ago (and it's somewhat dubious whether the healthcare system actually can sustain that peak).

fragmede 7y ago
Let me quantify that sacrifice in a US-centric way with some napkin math to ballpark: 328.2 million (Approximate population of the US [1]) * 80% for herd immunity (based on an R0 5.7 [2]) * 1% = 2.6 million people die. If the fatality rate is 0.5% instead, then 1.3 million people die If the fatality rate is 0.1%, we're still looking at ~260k-ish people. That's pretty grim. This situation is still developing so hopefully those numbers get adjusted downwards as later information becomes available. For reference, ~1.2 million people died to heart attacks and cancer in 2017. [3] [1] https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/ [2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article [3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
Jeema101 7y ago
One aspect that people seem to be ignoring with the whole 'healthcare capacity' argument is the mental health of the healthcare workers. The capacity everyone talks about is IMO the acute capacity, not really the chronic sustained capacity. That's because just like in a war, it isn't realistic to expect the frontline soldiers to stay in combat for longer than weeks at a time before they start to exhibit PTSD and their effectiveness begins to drop. Unless we have large reserves of doctors and nurses to rotate in and out I think we should be very careful not to take them for granted.

fragmede 7y ago

Let me quantify that sacrifice in a US-centric way with some napkin math to ballpark: 328.2 million (Approximate population of the US [1]) * 80% for herd immunity (based on an R0 5.7 [2]) * 1% = 2.6 million people die. If the fatality rate is 0.5% instead, then 1.3 million people die If the fatality rate is 0.1%, we're still looking at ~260k-ish people. That's pretty grim. This situation is still developing so hopefully those numbers get adjusted downwards as later information becomes available. For reference, ~1.2 million people died to heart attacks and cancer in 2017. [3] [1] https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/ [2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article [3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Jeema101 7y ago

One aspect that people seem to be ignoring with the whole 'healthcare capacity' argument is the mental health of the healthcare workers. The capacity everyone talks about is IMO the acute capacity, not really the chronic sustained capacity. That's because just like in a war, it isn't realistic to expect the frontline soldiers to stay in combat for longer than weeks at a time before they start to exhibit PTSD and their effectiveness begins to drop. Unless we have large reserves of doctors and nurses to rotate in and out I think we should be very careful not to take them for granted.