[jpxw]

Pros vs cons of taking natural immunity into account:

Pros:

- An extremely small number of people who would get side effects now wouldn’t

Cons:

- Logistics: you now need to perform a blood test on every single person in the country, process the results, send out vaccine invites based on the results, and set up some system where people can prove their blood test results. None of the aforementioned components currently exist. You also need to come up with some arbitrary threshold for “enough” antibodies.

- Cost: the blood test costs 4x as much as the vaccine, from what I see in other comments

- Incentives: you risk incentivising vaccine skeptics to deliberately contract COVID

[bitcurious]

Some notes:

>Pros:

>- An extremely small number of people who would get side effects now wouldn’t

What is an 'extremely small' number? The CDC[0] states that [Headache..., Fever, Nausea] are "common." Sadly 'common' is not defined, but with >100,000,000 folks with natural immunity it's hard to imagine a definition of 'common' that squares with any reasonable definition of 'extremely small'.

>Cons:

>- Logistics: you now need to perform a blood test on every single person in the country,

For a large chunk of the population you have past positive test results. For the rest, you just need to offer the option of taking a blood test. Furthermore, the majority of the US is already vaccinated. So in just a few steps you go from "every single person" to, if you allow me to guesstimate, somewhere in the single digit percentages.

Also a missing pro:

You have a government whose vaccine policies are grounded in proper science and medical ethics, reducing the number of vaccine hesitant individuals.

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/expect/af...

[jpxw]

I suspect that using past positive tests would make things even more complicated. It’s very easy to underestimate how difficult things are at the “tens of millions of people” scale, particularly for governments.

> You have a government whose vaccine policies are grounded in proper science and medical ethics, reducing the number of vaccine hesitant individuals

Circular argument, no? This point is only relevant to whether natural immunity should be correct if you accept that your own position (natural immunity should be taken into account) is correct.

[postalrat]

We've already don't plenty of covid tests on people throughout the past year or so. Why not start with giving anyone who has a previous positive test a card saying they have the best possible protection.