Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

> Herd immunity (also called herd effect, community immunity, population immunity, or social immunity).

Community immunity would rhyme and not be received as negatively by those that already hate the government as the herd word. It would also convey community, which is a caring nice word.

For the modeler, the purpose was estimating the true number of cases (which they estimate as current_deaths * 800 for a first-order approximation) -- but similarly, you could use that to estimate CFR by taking (num_cases / 8) as the denominator. Except, of course, that you can't realistically estimate num_cases. With the exception of Diamond Princess and possibly South Korea, everybody's numbers tell you more about the number of tests they run than the number of infected that exist.

One doctor from John Hopkins, for example, estimated that there are between 50k and 500k cases in the US as of 3 days ago -- and my own admittedly-amateur estimations using CDC numbers for deaths from influenza and all-cause pneumonia could only set an upper bound of ~400k cases as of March 1st

The uncomfortable truth is, the British government have weighted cost and benefit, and they have decided, the death of thousands or more is not worth the cost of near-absolute lockdown of a country, It might lead to total breakdown of the economy, full-recession, and that may cost more lives anyway. These elder people are old enough anyway, and the death rate for young is just 0.2%. (which rise to 1.3% for people elder than 50, and 6% for elder than 60 according to data from China)

What does those number mean? If you and your partner's parents are elder than 60 years old, there is 25% chance, at least one of them will die. That is, very likely, you're going to hear it from your best friends that one of their parents died from COVID-19. Are you okay with that? (Under the assumption everyone will get infected anyway). And beware, these statistics are not final, and mostly from patients who received some level of medical care, although we do not yet know how many of those heavily-ill patients received intense care. Without medical care, the number could easily double, after all, it takes time to die, that's just how lung disease works.

There is only one case that I've been able to find of a person who was diagnosed twice that can't easily be explained away as having been discharged while still infected. And even that case might be one like that.

This is also why testing everyone and anyone is a bad idea. Half or more of positive tests of people without symptoms being tested because they are in close contact with infected seem to be false positives. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32133832 I've seen something else I can't find at the moment that says that only about 10% of those with both potential COVID19 symptoms and a contact history indicative of possible contact are positive. It's both pointless and dangerous to have someone get a false positive reading, perhaps do self-quarantine for 14 days, then go out and promptly get (not re)infected.

The US government (and I think UK too) is getting a lot of criticism for restricting testing to those who meet the requirements of symptoms and contact history, but it's almost certainly because the CDC is aware of this. The Canadian government, too; Prime Minister Trudeau is not being tested, although his wife is positive, because he is asymptomatic. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/12/sophie-...