Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => COVID-19 => Topic started by: evan_au on 23/03/2020 20:20:51
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This question was raised by Radio NZ in their discussion with Chris Smith this week.
This is a classic conflict between the needs of the one vs the needs of the many:
- It is certain that as the virus spreads, hospital intensive care beds will be exhausted, and seriously ill people will die as they can't get access to a respirator (as is happening now in Italy)
- Thinking only of myself: If I infect myself with COVID-19 now, the hospital will probably still have spare respirators. If I get severely ill, they will still be able to treat me, I will probably recover, and then I will be immune.
- Impact if everyone thought only of themselves: If everyone infects themselves with COVID-19 now, the hospitals will be immediately overwhelmed, and many of these people will die. Worse, these intentional spreaders will (accidentally) spread it to others, so there will be a rapid growth in infections, and the hospitals will be overwhelmed even more
- Thinking of society as a whole: We need to increase the capacity of intensive care beds as rapidly as possible. But we also have to slow down community transmission to a level where the hospitals can cope.
There is clearly a problem with acting entirely out of self-interest: Since there is a limited resource (hospital respirators), everyone acting out of self-interest results in self-destruction.
- So at times like this, we must encourage community spirit to triumph over narrow self-interest
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There is an argument that (in a couple of years, after there is a high degree of herd immunity among adults) for having COVID parties for young children.
The symptoms appear to be relatively mild in children. This may be like the "chicken pox parties" that were once held for children - get it as a child, which is better than getting it as an adult.
- Subsequently, we have discovered that chicken pox has long-term consequences, in the form of "shingles". We now control chicken pox with a vaccine.
- At this stage, I have not heard of long-term consequences from COVID-19 (it's still too early) - we are still trying to deal with the immediate consequences...