How is the military handling this?

[jducoeur]

Consider a possible plan:

Take a few units. Pre-emptively quarantine and deliberately expose them to COVID-19. Wait until they're all the way through, then repeat with the next few.

There's a certain cold logic to it. They're generally young and healthy, so most of them won't fall seriously ill; for the few who do, there are military hospitals. They're already under military orders and jurisdiction, so you should be able to define and enforce a truly strict quarantine. And presuming that you're fully immune after you've been through it (a non-trivial assumption, but one devoutly to be hoped), that gives you a growing number of soldiers who are able to step in and help if things truly hit the fan.

Of course, there are any number of really nasty versions of this scenario, where this becomes the leading edge for a coup of some sort. But I still mostly trust the US military more than I do our actual leadership at the moment.

Not sure whether something of the sort is actually happening now, but if I was at the staff level, I'd be at least seriously investigating this approach...

Comments

[laurion]

I was thinking about the same thing a bit last night. Wondering if -controlled exposure- could be used to get some parts of society back to fully functioning. But yeah, you'd need a good way to ensure that only those who were immunized through infection and were past the point of shedding the virus were allowed out. The military has the best chance of doing it.

But having grown up in the military I'm pretty sure it wouldn't actually go as planned. In part because many of them are young, and lack the personal discipline. External discipline they can actually handle, but enough of them would sneak out of quarantine after a few days of it that it wouldn't work at the majority of military installations.

Most military installations are near or in other centers of population, and cuts in military funding and shifts in culture mean:
A lot of military personnel live off base, especially those with families.
A lot of military personnel depend on civilian infrastructures such as gas stations, groceries and pharmacies, and social entertainment.
A lot of military work is now done by civilian subcontractors.

And as you said, that's all even presuming the reinfection rate is virtually zero.

[elusiveat]

I would imagine that this wouldn't take place in ordinary barracks or housing on bases, but in some kind of small scale, locked down facility, maybe analogous to the infrastructure that's used for POW training. Would that make a difference?

Last night I was wondering what the curve would look like if there were systematic intentional infection of all young healthy people. Spouse noted that that isn't all that different from the (not exactly intentional?) experiment that the UK is doing with delaying social distancing except for the elderly / vulnerable.

[crosslet]

Personally I think the medical ethics of this approach are highly questionable. Even with volunteers and informed consent, dicey IMO

[jducoeur]

Hence "cold logic", yes. It's hard to see how something like this could be done with civilians, but the rules have always been somewhat different for serving military, so I suspect it's *legal* in that case. (Although this is one of those places where ethics and legality aren't necessarily on the same page.)

[writerkit]

This is how you discover someone has a previously-undiagnosed health complication, kill them, and get sued for wrongful death or medical malpractice.

[mindways]

Before I read about how *long* the severe and critical cases can end up in the hospital for, I was actually wondering if this was a viable strategy - opt-in only! - for getting a baseline of doctors who are immune, and thus not likely to hit the problem of Wuhan where they succumb to Covid-19 just as things are worst.

But while doctors are probably much more keenly aware of "don't spread it" protocols, they are also, on average, rather older. And even those cases that are merely "severe" will end up in the hospital for weeks, so I suspect it's not a great gamble.

[alexxkay]

Immunity-after-infection has not yet been established to be true, AFAICT.

[mindways]

That's my impression as well. I've been seeing it referred to as "presumed true".

I also saw one article (don't have the URL, sorry) about how there are various reports of people who've gotten it twice, that most medical professionals suspect it's "resurgence" rather than "re-infection", but that the jury is still out.