I recommend watching the whole video, as it is by far the clearest argument in favor of the "herd immunity" approach I've seen. The problem with the approach i

I recommend watching the whole video, as it is by far the clearest argument in favor of the "herd immunity" approach I've seen. The problem with the approach is that it assumes several things that, shall we say, there is not yet evidence for. 1. The disease is relatively mild, certainly less than an order of magnitude more fatal than influenza. 2. It is possible to protect older people and other vulnerable populations while the disease spreads through most of the rest of society. 3. After people recover from the infection, there is lasting immunity. If these three things are true (and some other things that I'm not going to argue with, including that it will take a long time to get a vaccine), then herd immunity is a reasonable strategy. But let's look at each in turn. 1. The death rate in New York City is already 0.1% of the entire population. Even under very strict assumptions, that we're exactly at the peak of a totally symmetrical curve, and that herd immunity results in 50% of the population being infected, that results in a lower bound of the IFR at 0.4%. Lombardy gives similar results (0.12% of the population directly attributed to Covid-19) 2. Prof. Giesecke admitted that they failed to do so in Sweden. It is not clear how this could be done, as elderly people do not live in a bubble, but rather have lots of workers coming in and out of the facility to help take care of them. 3. SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus, and we just don't have the data yet. You can extrapolate from existing coronaviruses, which suggest that immunity will last at least a year for most people, but there are worrying signs (low antibody production, reports of reinfection that might or might not be testing artifacts). We just don't know. To me, it was a gamble, and we'll know before long whether it pays off. There were some things that bothered me about Prof. Giesecke, such as his dismissal of the experience of China ("it's a different world"), and other things that made a lot of sense. People who want to believe will be citing this video as authoritative support for their beliefs. If these assumptions turn out not to be consistent with evidence, then people will be citing this video as a case study in how smart people can get stuff horribly wrong.