> The flu mutates regularly, and there's a ton of strains.
... which a substantial fraction of the population is immune to. Only 5-20% of the population gets the flu each year. CoVID-19 will infect 60-70% of the population, at a minimum, unless measures are taken to contain its spread.
> Results showed 0.37% mortality rate, which is an order of magnitude lower than the fatality rates being published
I've seen most people assuming a mortality around 1%, which is not that far off from these results. In Italy, 1% may well be correct, given how the healthcare system was overwhelmed there.
> I'd suggest that the actual mortality rate of my plan would be incredibly low.
If you can successfully shield the entire at-risk population, which easily approaches half the population of many countries. Once you add up old people, obese people, people with diabetes, smokers, people with heart conditions, and all the other at-risk groups, you come to a sizeable fraction of the total population. Trying to shield those people while the virus infects most of the rest of the population sounds incredibly risky to me. It's not even obvious that you can achieve natural herd immunity without at-risk people getting sick, because you need 60-70% of the population to get sick.
Overall, I don't understand the motivation behind such a risky plan. Why not just go through a 6-week period of lockdown, and then control the epidemic afterwards with extensive testing, good contact tracing and social distancing measures? Countries other than the US appear to be successfully implementing this strategy. Some, such as South Korea, were acted competently enough that they didn't even require the lockdown phase.
> Only 5-20% of the population gets the flu each year.
Only 20% of America is 70,000,000 people. That's staggering. The economic impact of the flu is enormous.
> I've seen most people assuming a mortality around 1%, which is not that far off from these results. In Italy, 1% may well be correct, given how the healthcare system was overwhelmed there.
It may be 1% in Italy because the population of Lombardy was overwhelmingly old, and overwhelmingly sick. The average age of death in Italy was 80.5 and the average number of underlying medical conditions was three.
> Only 20% of America is 70,000,000 people. That's staggering.
So imagine 4x as many people getting infected with a virus that is many times as lethal.
> It may be 1% in Italy because the population of Lombardy was overwhelmingly old, and overwhelmingly sick.
And the US has other problems, such as obesity. But the mortality will be much higher wherever the virus overwhelms healthcare systems. As we've seen, that can happen very quickly.
If we, again, assume that 15% of the US has already had it (as in Gangelt), and that herd immunity kicks in at 60-70%, that means we'd expect to see another 45-55% of the population -- 147-179 million cases. If we actually isolate the vulnerable, basically nobody would die.
That would be an incorrect assumption. The Gangelt study is about one small town in Germany where there was a known superspreading event at the Carnival festival.
If 15% of the US had already been infected, then based on the Gangelt study, there would be 200 thousand deaths, and millions hospitalized with severe illness.
... which a substantial fraction of the population is immune to. Only 5-20% of the population gets the flu each year. CoVID-19 will infect 60-70% of the population, at a minimum, unless measures are taken to contain its spread.
> Results showed 0.37% mortality rate, which is an order of magnitude lower than the fatality rates being published
I've seen most people assuming a mortality around 1%, which is not that far off from these results. In Italy, 1% may well be correct, given how the healthcare system was overwhelmed there.
> I'd suggest that the actual mortality rate of my plan would be incredibly low.
If you can successfully shield the entire at-risk population, which easily approaches half the population of many countries. Once you add up old people, obese people, people with diabetes, smokers, people with heart conditions, and all the other at-risk groups, you come to a sizeable fraction of the total population. Trying to shield those people while the virus infects most of the rest of the population sounds incredibly risky to me. It's not even obvious that you can achieve natural herd immunity without at-risk people getting sick, because you need 60-70% of the population to get sick.
Overall, I don't understand the motivation behind such a risky plan. Why not just go through a 6-week period of lockdown, and then control the epidemic afterwards with extensive testing, good contact tracing and social distancing measures? Countries other than the US appear to be successfully implementing this strategy. Some, such as South Korea, were acted competently enough that they didn't even require the lockdown phase.