having the disease as soon and in as safe a manner as possible so as to become immune to it would allow them to act as firewalls towards the disease and help vulnerable populations
Note that preventing yourself from getting it also acts as a firewall.
If there are no long-term effects, then I’d think the ideal would be to get the virus and then not pass it to anyone else. So, following your argument, one might want to marginally increase their chance of getting it. But it seems hard to do that w/o also marginally increasing your chance of passing it to someone else.
You’d want to find a way to get a little bit of exposure for yourself, w/o exposing anyone else to you. So, if you live alone and are completely isolating from other people, maybe it would be a good idea to go ahead and lick all your delivery packages. (See also Robin Hanson’s variolation proposal.)
But unless you can find a way to make the exposure profile asymmetric like this, marginally increasing your exposure doesn’t seem net beneficial. (And that’s even after assuming there are no harmful long-term effects and that one’s personal risk is low enough not to matter.)
Technically as long as everyone else you expose to it has a similarly low risk profile and low likelihood of transitively passing it to anyone with a high risk profile, I think it would still be beneficial until herd immunity has already been reached. In practice, of course, that’s incredibly hard to assess except for one’s household members, and household exposure is probably high-dose. So I think I agree with your conclusion, but for slightly different reasons. (Maybe if everyone in your household licks the packages, it would still work? :P)
Note that preventing yourself from getting it also acts as a firewall.
If there are no long-term effects, then I’d think the ideal would be to get the virus and then not pass it to anyone else. So, following your argument, one might want to marginally increase their chance of getting it. But it seems hard to do that w/o also marginally increasing your chance of passing it to someone else.
You’d want to find a way to get a little bit of exposure for yourself, w/o exposing anyone else to you. So, if you live alone and are completely isolating from other people, maybe it would be a good idea to go ahead and lick all your delivery packages. (See also Robin Hanson’s variolation proposal.)
But unless you can find a way to make the exposure profile asymmetric like this, marginally increasing your exposure doesn’t seem net beneficial. (And that’s even after assuming there are no harmful long-term effects and that one’s personal risk is low enough not to matter.)
Technically as long as everyone else you expose to it has a similarly low risk profile and low likelihood of transitively passing it to anyone with a high risk profile, I think it would still be beneficial until herd immunity has already been reached. In practice, of course, that’s incredibly hard to assess except for one’s household members, and household exposure is probably high-dose. So I think I agree with your conclusion, but for slightly different reasons. (Maybe if everyone in your household licks the packages, it would still work? :P)