OffenhamSkyBlue
Well-Known Member
Thanks for the rant, but can i refer you to the last line of my post, which said "I think that is maybe what they were originally suggesting with the herd immunity theory, but it seems now as though more people might be more at risk than they originally thought."Letting this rip through the population by having Coronavirus parties is, politely, a really, really bad idea. Even Trump can see that.
It’s about numbers and the fact that the virus kills healthy young people as well the old.
Let’s say you want to get herd immunity by exposing 50% of 50 million people (those numbers are on the low side of how this works, btw).
Even if only one tenth of one percent of those people died, that would be 25,000 dead. For the period over which those people and the far greater number of survivors who need urgent, intensive medical care are treated, the entire health system grinds to a halt.
Heart attack, stroke, cancer, car accident, baby or child with severe breathing difficulties at birth or later? Unlucky, they die too during this period, because there are considerably more than 25000 people trying to get into 5000 ICU beds and the whole focus is now on them.
That’s why it’s a disastrous idea and why no one is doing it.
Herd immunity can work for diseases that don’t kill people, or better, where there’s a vaccine, but for this it would be absolute, unbelievable carnage.
Look at what’s happening right now in our hospitals, and look again at Italy, Spain and New York. Scale that up by an order of magnitude and you can get the idea of where we would be in a few weeks without a lockdown.
When the health service has a chance of coping, and when you’ve got the testing resources in place to track, trace and isolate outbreaks is when you can ease up on this, but the real solution isn’t going to Coronavirus parties, I suspect.
Implication being that it wouldn't work. Sorry if you thought i was suggesting otherwise.