Submitted by sibylshepherd in USA
We are on the edge of a precipice! The U.S. will reopen in fits and starts, it can't not, however you feel about it, and covid will slay us in fits and starts until a cure is found in a year or two or maybe sooner or maybe never. Easily hundreds of thousands more people will die, according to some models. We need decisive action now, and here's a plan for going forward that I think the leaders of our country are foolish for not considering seriously:
There are 330,000,000 people in the U.S.A. Many of these people are at risk for complications and/or fatalities from covid-19 due to age, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, lung & heart disease, etc. If we can separate the population into a high-risk group and a group of people who have less than a 1% chance of ICU hospitalization from infection. And if the low-risk group still makes up the majority (say, 3/5) of Americans. We can achieve an effective herd immunity if around 70% = 140,000,000 people from this group volunteer to become infected, quarantine for two weeks, and then go about their lives, taking antibody tests as needed. We could do this in less than a half a year by asking a new group of 10,000,000 low-risk people spread across the country to volunteer every two weeks. We could do this without overwhelming the hospitals, because 1% of 10,000,000 is 100,000, which is around the total number of ICU beds we have available in this U.S. We could do this with a total death toll, among the low-risk group, of less than .1% of 140,000,000 = 140,000. And we could ask the volunteers in these groups to participate in vaccine challenge trials to speed up their development and testing.
Then, once the low-risk group has achieved herd immunity, each individual in the high-risk group could choose to remain in self-isolation until a vaccine or treatment is found, or choose to volunteer to be infected.
With no vaccine or herd immunity, I believe that the societal, economic, and death toll the virus causes collaterally will be much worse than anything this course of action causes directly. Furthermore, by standing by and doing nothing as more of our states open up and welcome the virus to spread through vulnerable populations with almost zero immunity, the leaders of our country are condemning us to die.
emma wrote
fuck off, boris johnson