SHeesh - did you just see THAT on CNN? "Of 146 people who tested positive at a Boston Nursing Home,

[Igel]

32. No, it's not.

But a chain of assumptions gets you from widespread asymptomaticity (to coin a word) to faster herd immunity.

There are assumptions there--infection always triggers antibodies, the antibodies are the type that suppress infection, antibody-based immunity is long-lived.

Two of them are built into the hope that a vaccine will rescue us, however. But while we're discussing possibilities, we're discussing possibilities.

But, yes, it does mean you could catch it. It also means you might already have had it. It redefines risk for high-risk groups. It redefines risk for everybody.

But now I wonder if the positive test numbers skew to the aged. We know that the young catch it at the same rate and are rarely hospitalized and more rarely die. We know that people in their 20s-40s with it are less often hospitalized than the elderly, and while they can wind up in the ICU and on ventilators it happens at a much reduced rate and they're more likely to recover. I wonder if there's an age skew to the tests, so that the elderly who are infected are much more likely to show symptoms.

On edit:
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/health/2020/03/27/indiana-coronavirus-test-results-show-breakdown-ages-sex/2925854001/ gives me pause. Assuming that it spreads equally well in the population, look at how the tested population breaks down by age. (Keep in mind that the different groups aren't all equally represented in the population, so those percentages aren't the same as % of that age group infected and tested positive, and that the intervals aren't all the same: 1-19 is a far bigger portion of the population than 20-29, for instance, and 20-29 is a larger number than 70+).

Looks like if you're older you're more likely to be tested. Hypothesis: Asymptomatics and mild cases form a larger percentage of younger cohorts. Some age cohorts have had a lot more tests run on them than others.