Here is a factor to consider: what Herd Immunity looks like will vary a LOT depending on the overall health of the population. I see all these experts say that 60-70% of people need to get the disease for it to disappear.
But what they MUST mean is they must be EXPOSED to the disease. This is just how the math works.
Some 20% of Americans get the flu each year. The flu comes, kills some tens of thousands of people, then disappears. It sickens about 60 million, even though many have had the flu vaccine.
It seems reasonable to assume though that perhaps 200 million Americans are EXPOSED to the flu virus, that year’s iteration, or one of them. They just don’t get sick. Perhaps they develop antibodies that disappear soon enough, or perhaps the disease doesn’t even get that far. I’m not entirely sure what specifically happens when a virus stumbles into a perfectly functioning immune system. If two tiny, tiny little viruses happen in, and are both killed immediately, would you see that in a blood test? I don’t think so. I think that likely happens dozens of time a day for most of us. We are under continual attack, but most of us are well defended.
And what happened, plausibly, with the Spanish flu is that many million of people had weakened immune systems, so that a very much larger number failed to fight it off. It was not more deadly: the people were less well defended.
But with respect to the flu, I think this is how you get Herd Immunity with only 20% of the population.
This also means that you could get Herd Immunity with respect to COVID when only 20% of the population has tested positive. That seems to me a tenable hypothesis, in any event.
There is a great deal the “experts” obviously don’t really understand. Amplifying this inherent defect seems to be the added and artificial defect of a political agenda oriented around using this pretext to terrify people, in order–so it seems, since it makes no sense otherwise–to hurt President Trump’s reelection chances and to further train people in compliance with respect to overreaching and abusive government.
And I wonder, with respect to Farr’s Law, if this thing is not very much like a forest fire, where it sweeps in and kills everything weak and vulnerable, then runs out of fuel. This means the first wave will almost always be the worst, IN A HEALTHY POPULATION.
This could easily mean that most of the dying is done, even if not all the being sick.
But however we carve this thing up, we need to reopen the country. The kids need to go back to school. This hunkering and bunkering needs to end. This is no way to live, and we aren’t saving any lives, in my view.
There is an ENORMOUS–trillions, probably–amount of money to be made on a vaccine, so there is no reason at all to trust the sanguine salesmen of the miracle cure. Around here, it is called Betting on the Come. Smart people make plans based on what is at hand, or what is very plausibly and palpably near.