I think the talk of herd immunity is extremely
dangerous and nihilistic.
I think we can do better as humanity.
We do not know, first of all, whether immunity
is lasting in COVID, one.
Two, we don’t know what proportion of the
population would have to be immune to have
what we call herd immunity.
It may be as high as 60%.
To have 60% of the population infected would
— and we know that about 4%, 2 to 4%, of people die.
So that’s a death toll in the hundreds and
hundreds of millions.
I think that is an unacceptable moral choice
for us to make.
I think, rather, we should employ people to
be contact tracers, to deliver the food to the sick.
We should be ramping up PPE to protect people
to do their work.
If we harness the trillions of dollars that
are needed right now to prop up the stock
market and the global economy toward creating
jobs that would actually end the epidemic
and could be synergized with the needs of
the vulnerable to end the epidemic, that is
a far better moral choice, and it’s probably
a faster choice to end the epidemic, certainly,
and a much more moral choice than herd immunity.
But how does this work specifically?
I mean, you’re saying something like 300,000
people would be needed in the United States to do this.
Yes, yes.
And you actually go to a patient, and you
say, “Who have you been with over the last”
— what?
Yes.
So, since the time you were symptomatic and
a couple of days before.
And what we know is that with social distancing,
this is a bit easier.
Our average person in Massachusetts so far,
in the two weeks we’ve been doing this,
only has a couple of contacts, because people
are adhering to social distancing.
So, what you can do then is contact those
people and then try to keep them safe.
So, for example, in my situation, my family,
I live with my mom, who’s older, and so
we would want to — if I had been in contact
with someone, so I was out to do grocery shopping
— if I had been in contact with someone,
I would need to quarantine, which is different
than social distancing.
It means not sharing a bathroom.
It means washing down all the counters, etc.
And so, if I could not do that, then I would
need a safe place to quarantine.
And here in Massachusetts, we’re looking
at dormitories, hotel rooms.
And many people want to do this.
I mean, many health workers are begging for
these kind of safe quarantine places, where
you would then stay for 14 days as a contact,
monitored regularly, fed — right? — have
access to a cellphone so you can contact your
family.
And this is, again, all voluntary.
But this is part of how we do epidemic control.
This is how we fought Ebola.
Fourteen days of tracing and monitoring, and
then you can be released.
But that way, you don’t infect your closest
contacts, because most of this infection is
spread through very close contacts — family
members, etc.
