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Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

This is a great comment, thanks. So isn't there an argument in favor of infecting more people sooner in order to increase the immunity rate of the population, particularly if those people are at lower risk of complications for the disease?

For example why not pursue a policy such as: kids can go to school unless they live with someone who is at risk (since we know that children are at very low risk for complications). Similar to how we managed chickenpox before there was a vaccine.

I think we need to explore alternatives to lockdowns because I believe the economics of lockdowns will make them impossible to continue for very long. At the moment people see this as a "be heroic and do the right thing" issues, but most people don't yet understand the severity of the economic impact and haven't yet been personally affected by it. Lockdowns will probably become politically untenable by May or June whether anyone today likes that fact or not.

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Eh, it's kind of like the decision on how bags of groceries to carry from the car to the house at once -- it's faster the more you take, but the more you carry the more likely you are to drop them and the more catastrophic the accident becomes when it happens.

It's tricky to take large bites here because of the short doubling time compared to the relatively longer recovery time -- in the ~3 weeks it takes your currently-infected cohort to recover, your infected population could increase 100-fold if you aren't careful. Mistiming things -- misjudging how many people are currently infected -- by a couple of days can be difference between exposing 10% of your population to the risk and exposing 15%. There's a reason pandemics are often compared to forest fires.

This will get easier as time goes on, as the doubling period gets longer and longer.

Based on current estimates of how many people will die in the US, you can infer that we currently expect 5-10% of the population to be exposed in this first wave; I believe what widespread testing there has been in Italy leans towards about 10% of that population having been exposed there as well.

""isn't there an argument in favor of infecting more people sooner in order to increase the immunity rate of the population, particularly if those people are at lower risk of complications for the disease?""

Only if you would like to see the hospitals overwhelmed with cases that don't result in fatalities but kill lots of other people and also kill people with underlying conditions that would otherwise live full and productive lives.

Chicken pox was a steady state. It sucked that kids got it, but their parents and most adults were likely immune, so when they brought it home from school, it didn’t spread to parents.

But if you expose kids to COVID now, they will in turn expose their parents, who will expose their coworkers, etc, etc

I could see that being effective strategy if we didn’t have a vaccine in 30 years, but for now, most people are still susceptible.

>For example why not pursue a policy such as: kids can go to school unless they live with someone who is at risk (since we know that children are at very low risk for complications). Similar to how we managed chickenpox before there was a vaccine.

Because kids are the most likely to ignore even simple ways of preventing infection. Then you get exponential growth via kids and the health system implodes.

How does this square with Denmark, which is opening schools tomorrow? It's possible they're wrong, but they must at least have some reason to think what you're saying won't happen.

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