I've had a lot of questions asking why high risk people can't just be locked up at home and let everyone else go about business as usual so that healthy people achieve herd immunity and the virus hopefully fizzles out.
These are excellent questions and as a layperson I've been trying to research the likelihood of this paradigm as a covid exit strategy. I say again, as a lay person, I am a humanities major, but I did learn how to research and read statistics and data, and of course to consult with doctors, scientists, immunologists and epidemiologists far more knowledgeable than I. This is my understanding as a lay person.
My conclusion to date, as far as anyone has a conclusion in the midst of an ongoing and unprecedented modern crisis, is that the herd immunity theory for covid19 seems doubtful. So far, according to most of the studies I have seen. This thing is far from over, the virus is very new, there is much we simply do not know and obviously this impedes effective decision making at all levels because there are no long term peer reviewed watertight studies to base policy on, we only have a few months of data to rely on.
A note, I realise that this information can be unsettling. My intention is to try to comprehend where we are regarding our understanding of the dangers of this virus and to balance that knowledge with the requirements of maintaining daily life and the economy to constructively think of coping strategies during this crisis. It is not a zero sum game. There are many important considerations at play. Having as informed a picture as possible can hopefully help to formulate effective policies to safeguard the maximum number of people.
What exactly does this virus do? How dies it do it? How do we stop it from doing it? Can we kill it? How do we kill it?
1) The evidence of herd immunity is highly disputed and many studies suggest that even if we do expose most of the population they will not achieve any long lasting natural immunity.
2) Even if you lock up all the high risk people for the foreseeable future that has no impact on "normal" people becoming infected. Indications are that many "regular", young and healthy people may not experience symptoms, but could still suffer long term heart, lung, neurological and other damage, some of which might only become evident in months and years to come.
3) This virus has not been around long enough for us to know just how long term this damage to apparently even asymptomatic people will be. There is evidence to suggest that even young 20 somethings who experience mild to asymptomatic cases of covid19 will be left with disabilities and permanent health conditions, including high risk of stroke, covid triggered diabetes, lung scarring, neurological symptoms, brain damage. Even if this long term damage only effects maybe 10% of cases, that is not something to be lightly unleashed on an otherwise healthy population.
4) What will be the long term effect on the general population and the economy if allowing widespread covid infection leads to a large increase in people suffering permanent disabilities or a virus who's symptoms could flare up again months or years later? We are familiar with viruses such as malaria where recurrences like this are common. There do seem to be signs that infection with covid19 can lead to a raft of fibromyalgia type symptoms, like long term debilitating fatigue.
5) Following the 1918 influenza pandemic there was an epidemic of Encephalitis lethargica and while still not proved conclusively there are many who consider it to have been triggered by the influenza outbreak. Several researchers today studying the neurological effects of covid19 posit that the virus is causing similar effects in a substantial number of those infected and could trigger similar disease further down the line. Until we know more about covid19 and what it can do to the body it would be prudent to do all we can to contain the spread of the virus and prevent people from becoming infected.
To be clear, I am not saying that therefore we should be in lockdown for the next decade. I am saying that we need to be extremely cautious with the temptation to say lets just have all the lower risk young and healthy people get the virus and see if it burns out that way. In trying to formulate what I would call a longer term survival strategy of living with covid19 we need to think carefully how to balance avoiding infection, restricting the spread and of course caring for people's psychological and economic well being. Achieving herd immunity though may not be the panacea many hoped it could be.
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