UnHeard Immunity - Culturesmith

KG: Hey folks,

Me and an old Marine medical corpsman buddy started thinking about the insanity of proposing to open up early and just let herd immunity fight the virus. These fools need to do the math. They have no idea what they are talking about.

Virologists say for herd immunity to work about 70% of the population must become infected and survive. In the US, with a population of 331 million, 70% surviving a COVID19 infection comes to around 245-250 million people infected. How do I arrive at that number? It’s estimated that about 20% of the infected will need hospitalization. That’s 45-50 million people. About 6% of the infected population will die. That’s around 14-16 million. 70% of 331 million is 231 million, plus the 14-16 million who you must compensate for because they will die, getting us to around 245-250 million.

Think about those numbers folks. There are only around 924,000 hospital beds in the USA. ICU beds? A fraction of that number. Even if spread over 2 years, there is no way we can hospitalize around 25 million people annually in the USA, our health infrastructure would be disastrously overwhelmed, so the death rate of 6% from the virus alone would actually be much much higher, likely 15-18%.

It gets a lot worse.

And what about all the people with life threatening heart conditions, cancer, and all the other life threatening illnesses. Cancer diagnoses alone are around 1.75 million annually. Heart disease and stroke kill over two million with access to medical treatment. Over 70 million Americans have some sort of cardiovascular disease. Without any access to proper healthcare, how many of these millions would die?

What about all the victims of automobile accidents or other spontaneous life threatening events? They’d have scant access to lifesaving healthcare, so they’d just be left to die too? And what about the frontline healthcare professionals. How many of them would die from exposure to the virus, further comprising our healthcare system? How would we replace them, and with who?

It gets even worse.

If 45-50 million are are hospitalized over 2 years what will happen to our food production and distribution chain? Who grows our food? Who processes our food? Who delivers our food? People were fighting over toilet paper for God’s sake. If it comes to food, it will not be fist fights in a parking lot, not in a country with over 300 million guns. How many will die from random violence and malnutrition or starvation?

But there’s more.

Will we maintain proper sanitation, or will pestilence run rampant? What will we do with the millions and millions of dead bodies? If we can’t even give the people in Flint, Michigan clean water in the best of times, imagine what will happen without properly maintained city services and sanitation.

So, how many will really die? It’s too horrific to imagine, and still there are people saying they won’t wear a mask because it violates “their rights”, and herd immunity should be allowed to take its course, you know....... because .......the economy.

News Flash! There won’t be an economy folks!

Social distance, wear a danged mask, and vote Trump’s goddamn GOP into the Stone Age, they’ve done enough damage already. Sadly, November may be too far away to prevent a massive loss of life.

SN: As bleak a picture as you've described, the reality under this administration can still be so much worse. If ever one wondered what it might be like to stand at the tipping point toward dystopian future, this is it. Not from a sudden catastrophic event, but the accumulation of fear, mismanagement, selfishness, and the weaponization of the worst human tendencies during a prolonged crisis.