There's the link to the story. Below are my thoughts on it.
The article mainly asks questions, not provides answers. It does make me wonder what the costs in deaths would be to reach herd immunity.
There's just not
an easy answer to this situation. We either stay away from each other,
with the consequent damage to the economy and a death rate from suicides
and poverty-related events, or we try for herd immunity, with the
breathtakingly high death rates, or we end up with something in between,
like maybe a vaccine. Reading this makes me think we are not getting
through this virus attack without a lot of pain no matter what the
scenario.
I do hope this is
too pessimistic and that the 0.5 death rate is still too high an
estimate. Half a percent sounds like pretty good odds to me
individually, but applied to a population of over 300 million that's
still a lot of people dead. The point made about repeated waves of the
virus over a period of years also makes me wonder if death rates would
go down successively as it kills the more vulnerable members of the herd
first?
Seems most likely
to me that the virus is here to stay and will become part of the
background noise after a while, one cause of death among many. From a
mental health perspective, that may be the healthiest way to think about
it, the way we think about the flu today. I just hope we can get there
more or less intact and sane.
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