All we like cows?

I've had a few classes in epidemiology, I have spent a significant portion of my career diagnosing and managing contagious disease in a population setting, albeit my patients moo, but herd health is herd health, whether you are dealing with chickens or people.  While I appreciate everyone's concern and efforts to protect the health and lives of the most vulnerable in this epidemic, from the start I think we've had it all backwards.  Hiding out at home won't do squat to fix this problem, it only kicks the can down the road; it won't go away while we cover our eyes and pretend it can't see us if we don't look at it.  The theory of 'flattening the curve' might work if we had some 'herd' exposure, but we aren't flattening anything, we're avoiding exposure altogether and are just elongating the line leading up to the exponential peak.  The minute we leave home, the virus will start spreading again, as viruses do, this plan does nothing but put off the inevitable, unless we plan on staying home forever, which might work with chickens, but people aren't content to live like that.

Anecdotally I heard in school that Iceland has a native breed of cattle that will die if exposed to foreign cows because the creatures are so isolated that they have never been exposed to the common gamut of bugs every other cow in the world takes for granted, their immune systems will be overwhelmed by the usual microbial flora endemic to your average bovine.  That seems to be the current theory at work in many parts of the world: stay safely in Iceland with no exposure to foreign cattle.  But this can't last forever, that theory only works because there are Icelandic farmers willing to make hay and support the beasties in their isolation, how do we maintain a society in complete isolation?

My first year of school, the teaching hospital was full of West Nile patients, every stall was filled, neurologic horses everywhere.  Since then I have seen one case.  One case in fifteen years.  We could have kept our horses in mosquito proof stalls their entire lives, though it would not have been much of a life for the horse and kind of makes owning horses pointless, but they would be safe!  They developed a vaccine and natural exposure instilled immunity in the population; the very next year it was as if it had never happened, when the previous year it was the very end of the horse world, at least if you listened to the talking heads, and it was easy enough to believe, seeing all those flailing horses and full stalls, but the next summer those same stalls were empty and nobody seemed to remember a year ago it had been the end of the world.

I am not saying that we should just go back willynilly to life as usual with no precautions whatsoever, far from it, but thinking this will just magically go away if we hide at home long enough is ridiculous, that isn't how viruses work.  Protect those most at risk, use common sense and practical measures to slow spread (but not stop it entirely), but putting the entire country on house arrest only delays the inevitable.  Should we hide at home until a good vaccine is developed?  No.  It can take years to get a good, safe vaccine to market, and even if we wait that long in anticipation, who says we can develop a good or effective vaccine?  Corona virus vaccines in other species are lousy, the flu vaccine isn't great, there's a good chance we won't ever have a decent vaccine for this particular bug either.  There's my two cents, I'm just a cow doctor, so what do I know!