Ready, from what we saw here that did help, it's best if your parents don't come home now.
Right when Italy went into lock down, it also stated that no one was allowed to go stay in their holiday homes, nobody was allowed to move away from where they were at that time (unless they were just in Lombardy for temporary work). Because at the beginning of the crisis, when parts of Lombardy were locked down, people rushed to their holiday homes on the coast of Tuscany, or to relatives in the south, and now we have a hot spot on the coast of Tuscany, and we are expecting numbers to rise quickly in the South too. So not only can moving around from state to state raise the chance of spreading the virus in general, but as someone else said, you will be risking every time you stop for gas, food, toilet, etc.
I suspect that if you can dilly dally for a week over this discussion with your dad, Trump will close off access between states anyway and then your parents will have to stay put, which is really the safest bet.
Regarding the herd immunity, which is clearly logical, just that it's a bit cruel. Obviously if we just let the virus do it's thing, it will pass much quicker and we can all get back to work. I'm like Treasur, though, I can't accept letting hundreds of thousands of people die if I know I could prevent it. And methods like lock down aren't going to stop the virus completely, of course it can't. But it will put the health service in a position of being able to cope with the seriously ill. As we discovered here, when the ICU beds were totally filled up, it meant there weren't any beds for people with other critical problems either. People here waiting for cancer surgery are having to wait. People needing a bone marrow transplant are having to wait. This is was the herd immunity method causes when we are dealing with a virus as aggressive as the coronavirus.
I think we have to be careful of pointing the finger at anyone. When we are frightened, we need to find someone to blame, just like after BD, right? But as we're seeing with this crisis, those who pointed the finger originally, are in as big a mess themselves now. I think that it was just that nobody had ever experienced anything like this before in our day.
To remind people who might not know, I'm in Italy. We seem to be in our peak right now. The numbers are still very bad but not increasing, so we seem to be floating in the bad numbers. We judge our politicians, our health service, Europe, the banks, and it goes on...Two definite causes that we are aware of already that created the situation we are experiencing in Italy were:
1 In spite of the Health Ministry issuing warnings about the Coronavirus and how to prevent its spread to all hospitals and medical facilities in early January, no body seems to have read it or adhered to it, which allowed for the virus to be spread in the hospitals by the staff as well as patients.
2 Lack of protective material for medical staff, lack of ICU beds, lack of ventilators. If there had been enough masks and gloves and gowns, the virus would have spread less. If there had been enough ICU beds and ventilators, many could have been saved. Because of the lack of beds, people were only brought to hospital when they weren't breathing, making it very hard to save them at that point.
It's not even a question of money, it's a question of organization and preparation. Underestimating this crisis seems to have been a major contributing factor everywhere.