
Blue Origin pressures employees to travel to rural TX to test launch New Shepard - TechieKid
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/2/21198272/blue-origin-coronavirus-leaked-audio-test-launch-workers-jeff-bezos
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pjkundert
Enough, already! Get volunteers, and get it done!

All “at risk” and any scared people should be self-isolating, and the rest of
us should be voluntarily holding raves and getting this civilization to “herd
immunity” level by 2-3 weeks from now.

For healthy <55 year olds, the probability of catastrophic failure and death
is low enough that 100m people getting sick over 2-3 weeks should be
manageable.

The alternative — a _year_ of social distancing and partial quarantine —
stands a good chance of seriously damaging or destroying our civilization.

Put on some big-boy pants, and lets get this done.

~~~
eloff
First off, ~12% of hospitalizations here in Canada are people under 40. It's
not a laughing matter even for the young and healthy. Secondly it's causing
severe damage to your body which could manifest as permanent damage, or just
as having expended some of your limited capacity for self repair, leading to
earlier failure in old age. Nothing is for free.

If you're deliberately getting people infected for herd immunity, you actually
speed up the spread to all manner of people, including the most vulnerable.
And you make the burden on the limited health system all the more acute
causing additional unnecessary loss of life. Remember you need something like
50-80% of people infected to achieve herd immunity. Just doing the math on
that and the burden to the medical system - it's not pretty.

I've given this some thought, but I think it's a horrible idea.

~~~
pjkundert
Then, we’re “flattening the curve”, infecting old and infirm people for 6
months, until a vaccine is ready.

That’s the plan.

That’s a bad plan.

~~~
greedo
There's not going to be a good plan. The good plan set sail in early January
when we didn't consider SARS-CoV-2 a serious concern. So now we're choosing
between flattening the curve to mitigate the overall death toll, or ignoring
the moral cost and having 2.5m Americans die. I'm pretty sure where I stand on
this.

And a vaccine won't be ready in 6 months. 12-18 is more like it, though we
might be lucky and stumble upon a treatment to the disease itself.

