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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

As opposed to 100% of people locking themselves away? The reality is people won’t do what you’re asking. The evidence is in the infection curve. We have to manage the society/neighbors we have not the people we wish we had. Further, a few months later everyone can come out and play.

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> a few months later everyone can come out and play.

I'm not so sure. Governments can't admit that fighting such a contagious virus with non-pharmaceutical interventions is extremely difficult on the long run. You're just buying time for a cure (not necessarily a vaccine: drugs work, too).

The problem is people aren’t doing it so it doesn’t matter what the intention is. You need to tailor the public policy towards what people will actually do not what you wish they would do. Otherwise you’re left with the half measures that achieve absolutely nothing you see today.

If there's literally nothing suitable that would be automatically done, what would you do? Allow people to do whatever at the cost of lives or force them to do what is right?

Usually in law, number 1 is called negligence.

> Allow people to do whatever at the cost of lives or force them to do what is right?

You're invoking police power to massively disrupt people's lives indefinitely. That's unacceptable.

Let people exercise their inalienable freedoms and assume whatever risk they want.

We saw people preempt the government in avoiding risky behavior as the pandemic started, and we'll see people preempt the government in resuming normal life avoiding risk as they deem fit.

In case of this virus, probably not a vaccine. Or not alone. And any vaccine would need some period of widespread testing, comparable to how long it took to devise flu vaccines.

This one can jump species, reinfection cases have been described already, and coronaviruses in general are known to cause seasonal infections.

> And any vaccine would need some period of widespread testing

That's what the current Phase III trials are doing (30K people for Pfizer, 30K people for Moderna, ~12K people for Oxford/AstraZeneca). This should be enough to check for efficacy, while probably not enough for potential long-term effects.

Reinfections are, so far, a minuscule number compared to the total cases (2 properly documented cases), so I expect immunity to last at least a year, basing on the current data. Time will tell if I'm wrong, of course.

There have not been any re-infections. Any people who tested positive a second time saw either false positives or residual viral fragments.

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