Gratuitous bunny photo coming right up!!
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Let me guess … you are over 40 ?
You somehow created a category of “go get them sick” and then excluded yourself from that group ?
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Do they have numbers on the half of the population that don’t consider themselves a D or R?
How can anyone both trust Trump and the CDC? Nearly everything he’s said contradicts them.
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Trusting Trump requires a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in itself, because for every thing he’s ever said and every position he’s ever taken it’s easy to find a tweet that directly contradicts it.
Cults are not bound by reason.
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I’m assuming that the 0.2% mortality rate in under 40 year olds is completely explained by people in at-risk groups (already compromised immunity systems, chronic lung issues, etc.), who would obviously not lick Tom Hanks. Maybe the hospitalization rates are too high, though…
I mean, it’s not a serious proposal - too many unknown factors in who exactly is at risk and too many people that would not follow the plan if it were proven effective.
You got me - I’m just over that threshold. The slight uptick in 40-somethings, though, is probably explained by an increased prevalence of underlying health issues, and I ain’t got any. I’d also consider myself in the low-risk category. I’m like 50% sure I’ve already had it. But I’d gladly lick Tom Hanks for the good of humanity. Regardless, we’ve doing shelter at home for 2 weeks, with only trips out for supplies. Now that my area is under a shelter at home order for 30 days, we’re doing a step further - we have enough supplies to last for 30 days and we’re not going out for any more.
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Healthcare workers would not lick Tom Hanks. They gotta stay healthy.
That’s a big—and apparently inaccurate—assumption. Just earlier today an otherwise healthy 21-year-old woman from Buckinghamshire died of complications from COVID-19. She’s not the first young person with no underlying health issues to die of the disease and she won’t be the last.
No “maybe” about it. Any course of action likely to send even one more person to the hospital than we already have is a very bad idea. We’re about to be overwhelmed as it is.
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If we all shelter in place, the number of new cases will start dropping, but the WHO report from Imperial College says that we’ve got to keep that up until a vaccine is available (12-18 months at best guess for best case), which is going to be extremely difficult to actually do. Don’t get me wrong - if that’s the only option, I’m all in. I just think that we need to explore other options a bit.
Until we have a vaccine (is it even guaranteed that a vaccine is possible?), we’re going to have to make choices about how many deaths are acceptable. Even in the WHO’s 3rd scenario where we all shelter at home, they mention letting up on restrictions every couple of months for a month at a time. People will get sick at that time. Some of those people will die.
We are already down the rabbit hole. He just wants to see how deep it goes.
If nothing else, flattening the curve buys us more time to expand the capacity of our medical system to deal with the crisis. There’s no reason to take a “let’s get it over with by purposely infecting more people than the system can handle” approach when that is likely to result in a greater number of overall deaths.
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You always have the best Star Trek gifs
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From the survey results- People who ID as Independent overall don’t trust Trump- 57% to 43% (page 30)
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Uh, no. First of all, the reported mortality rates for various age groups varies widely between reporting countries, and for some age ranges under 40 it’s been at least twice that (e.g. working age adults - the mortality rate for the whole group is reduced because non-toddler kids have very, very low mortality rates). Early data from the US suggests that we’re going to see a lot more serious and fatal cases among young people than other countries have, possibly because of more underlying health issues other countries don’t have (e.g. obesity-related diabetes and cardiac issues, etc.). But there are a lot of 30-somethings on ventilators in the US now who were previously healthy. A 30 year old woman in the UK got sick, was sent home from the hospital because she was in a low risk group, and she just died. The absence of obvious health problems is no protection.
Second, the mortality rate is entirely a function of how well the state responds to the crisis and how many more patients than resources hospitals have. So far the data is coming from states that have dealt with the pandemic far, far better than the US is. (And so their data on mortality rates for some ages groups, for instance, is not useful because there were so few cases.) Literally no country has done as bad a job as the US in containing the spread. It’s an absolute shit-show here, and we’re clearly going to have a much higher number of dead than any other country has had so far, even if we don’t fuck up even worse than we are now. (Not just per-capita, but in total numbers.) Trump looks to be trying to actively fuck things up even worse than they are now.
Third, when care is rationed, young people get the ventilators, so they’re more likely to survive. It doesn’t mean they didn’t get seriously ill, have permanent organ damage. etc. Italy has simply given up on trying to save patients over a certain age, because the resources required to save them are going to the young. That’s going to be the situation here, but worse - we have substantially fewer hospital beds and ventilators per capita compared to Italy, our outbreak curve is far steeper, and young people are getting sicker. You get all the young people sick at once and a non-fractional percentage of them are going to die because there won’t be the IC resources to care for even just them. Add in issues that the US has with its health care that other countries don’t have that will add to the death rate. (Many un- and under-insured people, already-stressed rural hospitals are expected to collapse as a result of the early stages of the pandemic and will close while people still need care, lack of financial support for the ill, etc.)
The UK initially planned on something like what you’re proposing, except with a flatter curve. Then someone crunched the numbers, realized how many people (including young people) were going to die, and they dropped the plan immediately. Even if we could magically contain the virus in low-risk groups, there would still be mountains of bodies.
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According to my back-of-the-envelope calculation, that would kill about 330,000 individuals under 40.
329,000,000 (US population) x .5 (pop. under 40 = about 50%) x .002.
Sure you want that?
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"It’s the virus, stupid."
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Thanks… looking at that first page, in general, it is not good moral that over half the country is not feeling like “we got this” at this point. 
Roosevelt or Kennedy or even Bush he is not.
ETA thanks @Purplecat for the link.
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The shelter-in-place after licking Tom Hanks was an integral part of the plan - so it doesn’t really require magically containing the virus. But point taken - a mountain of bodies is not good. I was looking for information about how big the trenches would need to be to bury all the dead when arguing with Boomers that we all need to stay home, but never came up with a number. I think it would be a good way to illustrate just how big of a problem we’re trying to avoid here, though. Some people just can’t fathom what 1, 2, 4 million people in the USA dying would look like.
No.
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