Within reason, I can see how it might be wise for you. I think the largest uncertainty this question hinges upon is whether hospitals in your area have the capacity to treat you if your case is unexpectedly bad. You can get a good sense of this by monitoring available ICU beds in the immediate/short term, but beyond a week it’s hard to know.
And here’s maybe a more important question, though far harder to model: will hospitals in my area have more/less capacity to treat me later, if I just catch it at the naturally occurring rate?
I’m in NSW, Australia, so even though Omicron is somewhat milder, I’m not inclined to catch it right now. All the hospitals within a reasonable range are getting full and making hard choices. So if I’m going to choose a time to ideally contract it, I’d have to shoot for just after the Omicron wave burns itself out. I’ll get the Pfizer booster in February (after the initial 2x AZ mid-2021) but that’s a month later than I was hoping to.
And thinking about hindsight counter-factuals on what I could have done differently is very confusing in different ways (yes, I agree hindsight counter-factuals are verboten as actual evidence). I should have booked in my booster before everyone else here realised Omicron was going to significantly change the situation, or that could have been a good time to inoculate by contracting it. Unfortunately, by the time I could possibly have had enough information to know it was a good idea, it was too late to beat the rush of cases. Not sure if that dynamic would have been in play where you live, but it fascinates me that 3-4 weeks is long enough to resolve a lot of the very salient things we didn’t know. It may have resolved almost enough unknowns to be sure about when you’d want to catch it. But I’m not sure if we know when people in different locations should contract Covid intentionally. I think my inner jury is out, but I have the sense that I missed the best time I could have caught it.
Within reason, I can see how it might be wise for you. I think the largest uncertainty this question hinges upon is whether hospitals in your area have the capacity to treat you if your case is unexpectedly bad. You can get a good sense of this by monitoring available ICU beds in the immediate/short term, but beyond a week it’s hard to know.
And here’s maybe a more important question, though far harder to model: will hospitals in my area have more/less capacity to treat me later, if I just catch it at the naturally occurring rate?
I’m in NSW, Australia, so even though Omicron is somewhat milder, I’m not inclined to catch it right now. All the hospitals within a reasonable range are getting full and making hard choices. So if I’m going to choose a time to ideally contract it, I’d have to shoot for just after the Omicron wave burns itself out. I’ll get the Pfizer booster in February (after the initial 2x AZ mid-2021) but that’s a month later than I was hoping to.
And thinking about hindsight counter-factuals on what I could have done differently is very confusing in different ways (yes, I agree hindsight counter-factuals are verboten as actual evidence). I should have booked in my booster before everyone else here realised Omicron was going to significantly change the situation, or that could have been a good time to inoculate by contracting it. Unfortunately, by the time I could possibly have had enough information to know it was a good idea, it was too late to beat the rush of cases. Not sure if that dynamic would have been in play where you live, but it fascinates me that 3-4 weeks is long enough to resolve a lot of the very salient things we didn’t know. It may have resolved almost enough unknowns to be sure about when you’d want to catch it. But I’m not sure if we know when people in different locations should contract Covid intentionally. I think my inner jury is out, but I have the sense that I missed the best time I could have caught it.