05-10-2020, 11:05 AM
Technically, he is probably correct. Even absent a vaccine, with enough time the virus will infect enough people that there will be herd immunity and there will be few enough people left to infect that it will go away. It is worth noting that this is what happened to the 1918 influenza. The flu pandemic hit in two big waves (summar and fall of 1918, the latter being the major wave), and there were two, smaller waves in 1919 and 1920. And after that it largely did "go away", though it was probably circulating endemically.
The problem is that the virus will take with it somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% of the population (depending on what the ultimate case fatality rate winds up being). It will take roughly 75% of the community being sickened by it before herd immunity takes hold, and even if the CFR is on the lines of 0.1%, that's roughly 250,000 deaths to over 1 million deaths if the CFR is closer to 0.5%.
SARS didn't die down on its own; it required aggressive contact tracing and isolation. This was made somewhat easier by the fact that there was not much asymptomatic transmission of SARS and patients with SARS were sicker than patients with COVID-19, so most were hospitalized. But still, this was not an infection that went away on its own.
BC
The problem is that the virus will take with it somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% of the population (depending on what the ultimate case fatality rate winds up being). It will take roughly 75% of the community being sickened by it before herd immunity takes hold, and even if the CFR is on the lines of 0.1%, that's roughly 250,000 deaths to over 1 million deaths if the CFR is closer to 0.5%.
SARS didn't die down on its own; it required aggressive contact tracing and isolation. This was made somewhat easier by the fact that there was not much asymptomatic transmission of SARS and patients with SARS were sicker than patients with COVID-19, so most were hospitalized. But still, this was not an infection that went away on its own.
BC