One thing regarding the herd immunity response is that it seems to me to become a lot more plausible if you could direct who gets infected and becomes immune.
I did the numbers on the population of Sweden, combining our age demographics with the estimates from the Imperial College report.
With a population of around 10 million, if everyone here got infected, 831 000 patients would require hospitalization and 281 000 patients would require intensive care, which would completely unmanagable. However if only everyone below the age of 40 got infected, 65 000 patients would require hospitalization and only around 3 200 would require intensive care. And that constitutes pretty much exactly 50% of our population. So if it was possible to keep the age of the infected down substantially, it seems possible for a large part of our population to get immunity without completely overburdening the health care system.
So the downside of this approach is that if everyone below 40 gets the disease you are entering a situation where the disease is all over the place, and it will be hard to keep the 40+ people fully safe. For example many older people need to be _in a hospital_ for various reasons, which is exactly where the virus is.
In addition you might be inflicting death and long-term disability on quite a lot of those under-40-year-olds.
And I think at the end of it, under 40s immune might not even be enough for herd immunity. You need something like 80% I think.
One thing regarding the herd immunity response is that it seems to me to become a lot more plausible if you could direct who gets infected and becomes immune.
I did the numbers on the population of Sweden, combining our age demographics with the estimates from the Imperial College report.
With a population of around 10 million, if everyone here got infected, 831 000 patients would require hospitalization and 281 000 patients would require intensive care, which would completely unmanagable. However if only everyone below the age of 40 got infected, 65 000 patients would require hospitalization and only around 3 200 would require intensive care. And that constitutes pretty much exactly 50% of our population. So if it was possible to keep the age of the infected down substantially, it seems possible for a large part of our population to get immunity without completely overburdening the health care system.
So the downside of this approach is that if everyone below 40 gets the disease you are entering a situation where the disease is all over the place, and it will be hard to keep the 40+ people fully safe. For example many older people need to be _in a hospital_ for various reasons, which is exactly where the virus is.
In addition you might be inflicting death and long-term disability on quite a lot of those under-40-year-olds.
And I think at the end of it, under 40s immune might not even be enough for herd immunity. You need something like 80% I think.