What you're describing may be a controlled burn approach under a different name. After a certain point, the virus infects the entire susceptible population, and then it stops because everyone susceptible has died or obtained immunity.
Suppose 30% of the population is susceptible to covid. If lockdown policy slows the spread of the virus to 1% of the population per month, it would take 30 months before the pandemic passes. That's a very long time to do lockdown, very damaging to the economy and people's livelihoods.
I've read a lot about overwhelmed hospitals. I'm not clear on if it's happened in any widespread fashion. The media coverage tends to emphasize the bad cases and ignore the boring cases. It doesn't seem like people are unable to get medical care. I have checked the Texas online dashboard now and then, and currently about 10,000 people in a state of 29,000,000 are hospitalized with covid.
The logical policy would be let the virus pass through the population as fast as possible without overwhelming hospitals, given the specifics of any geography.
I'm sorry but you making one incorrect assumption after another.
No, it would not be logical to let the virus go. It would kill some people and causes other health effects. We don't want a few million deaths. Plus now there is clear evidence that some people don't have antibodies after they get it, a few months later, and this is not completely unknown in other diseases. Some people have some protection though. Plus there are people who get it a second time as far as we can tell.
There are not infinite number of hospital beds. In NY they were past the limits for a month, killing med staff and also ptsd for them. This was barely avoided in Seattle. It's happening now in Houston. The people sick with cv19 are blocking others from being treated, and some people stay home. The hospitals financial plans start to fail because all the other medical procedures are stopped because its dangerous to be at the hospital and they are repurposing say dermatologists to work in the cv19 wards.
I think some of what you are saying is true, but you may be lacking some balance in your sources of information. For example you say:
> It would kill some people and causes other health effects. We don't want a few million deaths.
A few million deaths would be in the 2-3 million range. This doesn’t seem realistic based on the data we have so far. About 140,000 people in the United States have died from the virus after about 5 months. It would require a 20x increase to have 3 million people to die from it. That seems like a really big reach.
> There are not infinite number of hospital beds. In NY they were past the limits for a month, killing med staff and also ptsd for them. This was barely avoided in Seattle
To be frank I've stopped caring enough to follow the news in detail anymore (which itself probably says something), so I don't know whether the rest of your comment is accurate or not. However, I can attest firsthand that this part pertaining to Seattle is completely false.
I live in Seattle and have had multiple friends/family members hospitalized with covid19. We were nowhere close to overwhelming hospital capacity. At the beginning of all of this, we had a massive field hospital in Century Link stadium set up and shut down without seeing a single patient, as well as a hospital ship which was supposed to harbor here but ended up being redirected (I believe to Los Angeles) because we didn't need it. Even now with the resurgence that's been happening, our metrics around ICU utilization are where we're performing best:
I'm assuming good faith and that you're simply worried just like everyone is, but you are spreading misinformation here. Again, I can't really attest with good knowledge to anything other than Seattle, but the fact that you are wrong about that makes me skeptical of the rest of your comment.
Suppose 30% of the population is susceptible to covid. If lockdown policy slows the spread of the virus to 1% of the population per month, it would take 30 months before the pandemic passes. That's a very long time to do lockdown, very damaging to the economy and people's livelihoods.
I've read a lot about overwhelmed hospitals. I'm not clear on if it's happened in any widespread fashion. The media coverage tends to emphasize the bad cases and ignore the boring cases. It doesn't seem like people are unable to get medical care. I have checked the Texas online dashboard now and then, and currently about 10,000 people in a state of 29,000,000 are hospitalized with covid.
Texas dashboard: https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#...
The logical policy would be let the virus pass through the population as fast as possible without overwhelming hospitals, given the specifics of any geography.