Quote:
Originally Posted by mort
I don't think so. You want to avoid overwhelming hospitals.
Herd immunity, if it is possible at all, would probably need at least 70% of the population to have been infected.
In Los Angeles County about 300 people have died from CV-19, assume only .5% mortality. That implies about 60,000 infections. L. A. County is home to about 10 million people.
Assuming .1% mortality, 70% of the population infected would require about 7000 dead, more than 20 times worse than right now.
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Avoiding overrunning hospitals is precisely why you wouldn't want to quarantine people prematurely. Start it too soon, and eventually people start relaxing their quarantine or the government ends it prematurely, and hospitals get overrun.
There's no reason to expect we'll be able to avoid your 20x more death figure. We're continuing to see the tally increase at roughly 1,500 per day in the US, and when mitigation regulations are relaxed, we'll see that figure climb again as people start interacting again. Since we have little herd immunity, that number can still rapidly explode, necessitating a quarantine all over again.
As I say, you want a certain velocity of disease spread, not because spreading disease is good, but because locking down the economy is bad and doesn't solve the problem of building herd immunity. Herd immunity is the only option with the exception of lockdown for the next 12-18 months while a vaccine is developed. Nobody is going to live like this for the next year and a half.