I don’t know who’s been pushing this idea, but someone has. I’ve heard this from so many different people that there’s no way it’s an independent thought for all of them, so someone must have crafted this message and pushed it out there.
“We’re all going to get it eventually so we just need to do it and get on with our lives.” These are people who seem to have, maybe begrudgingly in the face of overwhelming evidence, accepted the dire predictions of the models produced by epidemiologists and are on board with “flattening the curve” to help our hospitals handle the load. But they are NOT on board, it seems, with any long term changes to Life As We Know It. Once hospitals can handle the capacity, they say, we all just need to get infected at some point so we can develop herd immunity and get back to normal.
Besides, they say, most people who get it don’t even get sick! (The science of that hasn’t been established yet). It only affects old people! (Except for those who aren’t. Also, how is throwing old people under the bus OK?) Shutting down our economy is going to hurt more people than the virus! (Maybe, in some sectors, but this is not an either/or situation).
So, no. We do not all need to get it. We’ve seen that extreme social distancing measures can reduce the spread to virtually zero. We’ve seen that even our half-assed social distancing measures in the US can have a dramatic effect on how quickly it spreads, to the point where it could take years or decades or never to hit everyone.
We can be smart about how people return to work, and how businesses reopen. We can sacrifice crowded beaches, huge events, and non-essential travel for a year or two. We need a clear message from our leaders that it is not an inevitability that everyone catches COVID-19 at some point, as long as we’re all willing to make some sacrifices. This is an opportunity to demonstrate the kind of pro-social behavior that everyone likes to think America can do (until it interferes with our love of rugged individualism), on a long-term scale. Let’s not accept mediocrity in the face of adversity as a victory.
I just cannot see people or politicians allow this to go on “for a year or two” or anything close to that. It just will not happen. The economic effects would be absolutely devastating and last for a very long time.
If football is cancelled this fall then that will start the pitchforks in the street.
I’m confused as to how some people are automatically equating this disease with chicken pox. I feel you can catch MOST diseases more than once? You certainly can with the flu, which is what COVID-19 seems to be fairly similar to (please don’t take this to mean I’m one of those, “It’s just the flu!” types).
Even if it was like chicken pox, the fact that many peop0le ARE completely asymptomatic means you could still unknowingly spread it to especially vulnerable people, which should still be a really good reason to stay relatively isolated.
Devastating and long-lasting economic effects are going to happen regardless. The question is do you want your devastating and long-lasting economic effects with a side of hundreds of thousands of dead people or without. Me, I’d like those people to be around if only because they’ll bolster the need for goods and services that will keep businesses running and people employed.
I understand what we are doing now, but the OP talked about this continuing for a year or two. That is so far outside of any estimates I have seen and simply not practical. Is every hotel in the country going to go out of business? Every casino in Las Vegas? Every single airline?
Sure, the OP mentioned non-necessary things, but if the economy goes completely under, how will people afford to eat or be able to pay for essential services? If you would say that the government would pay, with what? We cannot have stimulus for two years; hyperinflation and the demise of the U.S. Dollar would kick in far before then.
I’m not saying that the stay in place is not the right thing to do for now, but it cannot last for a year or more because there will be rioting in the streets and mass starvation. At that point, we wouldn’t have any choice but to open back up.
I didn’t say the lock-down orders had to continue for years. We can be smart about how we open things back up. People can go back to their offices, hotels can reopen, all while we can continue restrictions on group sizes and travel.
Megachurches aren’t essential. The Indy 500 isn’t essential. I understand that for those specific businesses, it’s a big deal to shut down for a year – devastating, even. That doesn’t mean we have to throw our hands up in the air and give up.
Chicken pox immunity lasts for years, though, right? Which is another thing – for a disease that didn’t exist 6 months ago, we have no idea how long (if at all, really) any immunity will last. We don’t know how frequently the virus will mutate. On top of everything else, this “everyone will get it eventually and then we’ll be fine” notion is premature, at best.
But you don’t catch the SAME flu more than one. You don’t get H1N1 twice. You don’t get Hong Kong flu twice. You don’t get Swine flu twice.
No. They are just really bad at risk/reward assessment.
It’s very rare, though, and it involves “not holding a titer,” which is essentially an immune system defect. It’s not a serious one, but someone who doesn’t hold a titer, depending on whether they never hold one, or simply have immunity fade over several years, are vulnerable to all diseases, and especially dependent on herd immunity.
SO not essential. I live in walking distance of the brickyard, and if this virus ends the race forever, I will be its best friend.
Since when? You can get Shingles as an adult, if you had Chicken Pox as a kid, but that’s more of a recurrence, than a new infection.
AFAIK, Chicken Pox works like most viruses in that once you get it, you’re immune to future infections. And the earlier you get it in life, the less severe it is.
"Recovery from primary varicella infection usually provides immunity for life. In otherwise healthy people, a second occurrence of varicella is uncommon. Second occurrence of varicella may be more likely to occur in people who are immunocompromised. " (emphasis mine).
As I recall a cousin of mine got chickenpox twice.
I had chicken pox twice: a very mild case as a small kid (3 or 4 or something… I don’t remember it), and then another case at 19, also pretty mild as such things go.
A lot of people say shit like that because inherently they don’t believe in the whole flattening curve thing, but they don’t exactly know how to vocalize it. If my entire neighborhood stays home and doesn’t sick for a month or two what happens the next time we walk outside? What about my county, or my state or country? How is two months from now different from now if only 10% of the population has been infected?
I believe what they’re saying is that 2 months from now we’ll have more PPE, more ventilators, more body bags, etc. Back in February the models were saying we could see 1.5 million dead in the US from this; well that hasn’t changed, but some people now seem to be explicitly saying, “Yes, let the 1.5 million die, but use social distancing to, you know, stretch it out over a year or so instead of all at once.” It’s kind of… insane.
Help me out here. I thought that was flattening the curve. IOW, it will continue to spread and infect as many people as it otherwise would have, but if we take these measures, we flatten it so we are not overwhelming the hospitals causing people to not be able to get treatment–for Covid-19 or for other things.
Plus, how does having more body bags prevent death?
For the last two weeks they have been told flatten the curve. They see their county has 20 new cases a day, and they have a general idea that the county has about 500,000 people.
Now the average person isn’t going to sit down for a few hours with a calculator. They’re not going to research disease transmission rates or testing rates or anything like that. They hear a vaccine is years off, and they get that feeling that something just doesn’t add up. They come to the conclusion that more people need to get it and get through it before we’re back to normal.
Let’s say that China quarantines every single person and mammal inside their borders, forcibly, in air-filtered rooms until everyone who has the disease is completely through it and no longer infectious.
If China was the entire world, the disease would die out and pass away into the land of the dodo.
If China is not the entire world then they, having now destroyed the disease in their own borders, they have to completely block all flights, all land travel, etc. until a vaccine is developed. They need to block bats, tigers, and pangolins from traveling through their border. Probably they want to block all mammals, just to be safe.
If they don’t do that, and they aren’t the entire world, then regardless of their having completely eradicated the disease within their borders, it will return and spread again. And it will spread until there is basic herd immunity, to restore the world to what it was like before vaccines and seasonal respiratory viruses came around every year.
Not even China will eradicate the disease with the measures that they have taken. And they aren’t going to shut off their borders - they physically couldn’t do it if they wanted to.
It may take years but, unless a vaccine comes through much quicker than we’re expecting or we maintain shelter-at-home for 18+ months, we should expect that we’ll approach something near a 50% infection rate (with 80% of people not even realizing that they’ve been exposed) before herd immunity is achieved.
When you have an infection that affects a small enough set of people that you can actually track those people and everyone they were in contact with, you might be able to squanch it and kill it off - if all other countries do the same. But you can do that within your own borders and be screwed, simply because you’re not the whole world.
Overwhelming the hospitals is a worst-case scenario that required dire intervention. Everyone gets it but slowly enough to keep up with hospital capacity is only a second-worst-case scenario, it’s not an inevitability. It’s very likely that there’s room for better outcomes.
We’re not even through phase one of our mitigation efforts yet, it seems very premature to start pushing people to suck it up and get sick because we’re all going to have to eventually, you know?
Right, it’s totally impossible for them to shut down their borders… except they have? Right now, the current rule is every country is allowed one airplane flight per week into China and all travellers have to serve a mandatory 14 day quarantine in a Chinese government provided facility.
Countries like Taiwan are also requiring mandatory quarantine for all arrivals and they’ve managed to have relatively loose travel restrictions while also keeping the number of cases at a manageable level.