it seems like what he's broadcasting is that what they're going to do is essentially expose different classes of people to the virus at different times, and there will be accompanying spikes with each exposure event. that means that we're essentially staging in immunity. it's increasingly clear that people in the 20-60 age range that have conditions like obesity are at substantial risk to illness. so, get ready for your reckoning.

the hope is of course that reintroducing normalcy in waves will allow the health care system to cope with a series of small crises, in aversion to a great crashing all at once.

so, we're essentially being queued.

i bet a computer science major came up with this.

the counter-argument, which i suspect will be better reflective of the reality when empirical measures come in, is that prolonging sustained exposure in small groups will make little difference in hospital rates for low risk groups, while maximizing the amount of hospitalization that is required for at risk groups. now, the twist is that it might be manageable, but it might also be unnecessary in sum total if the general population can get to greater immunity quicker.

i'm basically pointing out that the government response is ignoring a kind of basic calculus problem, in not actually calculating where the minima and maxima of the curves actually are, relative to a set of overlapping factors; instead, the public health response is basing everything on really one factor, in an oversimplified mathematics that will likely undo it's intended outcome, in the end.

what we appear to be heading for is a long period of sustained minimal transmission, and the health care system will probably be able to handle it relatively well. so, there is some success there, i suppose. but, i insist that the total workload of the hospital system will in the end be greater, which indicates that the number of people impacted will, in the end, be greater than it might have been otherwise, with potentially worse death tolls as a result.

the choice before us is not whether we will have natural immunity, but how we get to it. we're doing it in stages, it looks like.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-return-to-work-will-be-graduated-and-likely-months-off-trudeau-says/