[M T]

But fundamentally, I always return to this:  what is the ultimate goal you're trying to accomplish vis a vis the virus?  Is it to wipe it out from US soil?  That is just not going to happen . . . is it?  The prevalence is too great, and the virus "got away from us" too early.

I'm sure glad we didn't have to get to herd immunity for polio, measles, yellow fever, smallpox, Bubonic plague, and any number of diseases that we've managed to knock down to 0 or almost 0 cases.

Maybe over the next 20 or maybe 50 years, the world population will spend enough time in masks that the incidence of a number of droplet/aerosol-spread diseases will fall to the level that we can wipe some of them out, at least in first world countries that can and do spend the resources to hunt the cases down and isolate them.

Of course, all those diseases were controlled during a time when we had relatively free flow of information, pre-HIPAA.

I've occasionally seen news articles questioning whether herd immunity can be achieved.  That seems odd when the evidence seems to be that individual immunity is limited.   If immunity were to last 2 years, and you needed 50% of the people to be immune to reach herd immunity, then you'd need 75M cases a year in the US.   Think again!

[M T]

But fundamentally, I always return to this:  what is the ultimate goal you're trying to accomplish vis a vis the virus?  Is it to wipe it out from US soil?  That is just not going to happen . . . is it?  The prevalence is too great, and the virus "got away from us" too early.

I'm sure glad we didn't have to get to herd immunity for polio, measles, yellow fever, smallpox, Bubonic plague, and any number of diseases that we've managed to knock down to 0 or almost 0 cases.

Maybe over the next 20 or maybe 50 years, the world population will spend enough time in masks that the incidence of a number of droplet/aerosol-spread diseases will fall to the level that we can wipe some of them out, at least in first world countries that can and do spend the resources to hunt the cases down and isolate them.

Of course, all those diseases were controlled during a time when we had relatively free flow of information, pre-HIPAA.

I've occasionally seen news articles questioning whether herd immunity can be achieved.  That seems odd when the evidence seems to be that individual immunity is limited.   If immunity were to last 2 years, and you needed 50% of the people to be immune to reach herd immunity, then you'd need 75M cases a year in the US.   Think again!