Can herd immunity be achieved without breaking ICUs?

De Brouwer, E.; Raimondi, D.; Moreau, Y.

The current COVID-19 pandemic led to the rapid overload of Intensive Care Units (ICUs) in countries where the outbreaks was not quickly controlled. The containment measures put in place to control the outbreaks had a huge social and economic impacts, and countries are looking for strategies to relax these measures while maintaining the R_0 close or below 1, in an attempt to safely reach herd immunity. In this paper we analyse the feasibility of reaching herd immunity without saturating ICUs across countries. We provide an online tool, available at www.about-the-curve.net that simulates the time required for such a scenario with a SIR model. For United States, we find that a minimum of 5 months would be required, 22 months for UK, 1 year for Italy and 9 months for Belgium.