Once all the people who exist today, yes. I anticipated this response of yours. It sounds like a great gotcha in its surface, until you realize that every fas

Once all the people who exist today, yes. I anticipated this response of yours. It sounds like a great gotcha in its surface, until you realize that every fast-spreading respiratory virus works like that. It's happened with every flu pandemic, including the recent H1N1. SARS-CoV-2 appears to be an incredible spreader and a poor killer. What that means is the cost of perpetually trying to avoid infection are very high, whereas the benefits (avoided mortality) are quite low. Case in point, SARS-CoV-2 exhibits a fairly high degree of pre-symptomatic spread. I believe that this is almost certainly due to the findings of interferon-mediated early-course immunosuppression (read: in the early days of infection it prevents your immune system from reacting strongly, meaning that unlike many other diseases there is a period where you have enough viral load to spread it yet don't express symptoms). Also note that it does not exhibit asymptomatic spread, which would be even "worse" since pre-symptomatic spread only gives you a window of maybe days whereas asymptomatic is by definition across the whole disease course. Now factor in the fact that many people are either completely asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic (few symptoms). For those people, which may even be the majority of cases, it's such a not-big-deal that most don't ever realize they've had it. Some will have more of an actual cold, and some will have symptoms comparable to a run-of-the-mill flu. A small fraction of those infected will go on to experience increasingly severe symptoms, probably comparable to a normal SARS-1 infection (since SARS-1 is quite nasty), culminating in the worst cases in the need for invasive ventilation at which point death is incredibly difficult to avoid. (This is obviously an area of active research but it appears that the severe form of the disease is related to a state of immune disregulation where pathological cytokine release syndrome, the tissue damage from widespread neutrophil infiltration, etc wreak havoc). So, we have a virus that spreads incredibly well, yet is overall incredibly mild, and has very well-defined populations who are at real risk of severe outcomes. That is precisely the type of virus that is a horrible candidate for lockdown, which damages the entire society in the attempt to prevent what is perceived as a greater threat (but is actually not, in my opinion). So, as a society we saw a papercut and chopped off our hand. Oops. I am happy to provide sources for pre-symptomatic spread, interferon-mediated immunosuppresion, etc, but first I wanted to make sure that you were here to engage in good faith dialogue; i.e. whether I can convince you or not, you are actually willing to read (or try to read) the papers. I'm a bit scarred by numerous times (here and elsewhere) where I've invested a bunch of time into detailed posts and then quickly realized that the person on the other end was never serious about addressing the problem of SARS-2 but instead was there to toe the party line and reinforce their pre-existing conclusions.