This “herd immunity” thing is nonsense. So much so that doctors and scientists are warning against it:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/coronavirus-nh...

> It’s already too late. They’re on the Italy path.

Well, that's pretty much the point of the policy. 'Already screwed this year, let's try to cope, and be less screwed next year'.

I was very critical at first, but I'm more interested/satisfied with the response now, it does seem to be well thought through, even if there are also arguments against (of course there are).

Throw 2 or 3 hounded thousand lives away to have less economical impact next year.

I.e. pure evil IMHO.

especially because there is a non small chance that it will be more like 1-1.5 Million more death then necessary.

Evil is reserved as a description for gross failures of moral duty. Choosing pragmatically between several terrible options with highly unpredictable outcomes does not meet that standard.

Let's quantify things here, for a first world country with a social net.

On the one hand, we have people getting evicted from their homes and having to visit soup kitchens.

On the other hand, we have dead people (more likely, dead poor people).

Evil seems pretty fair.

Which translates directly into many years of reduced life expectancy, no?

I'm saying that the two miseries feel like apples vs oranges, given the context.

You'd have to go pretty far to convince me that (even mass) economic depression is more harmful than widespread, near-term fatalities.

That's hard to weigh against a concrete number of very concrete deaths and serious recuperation periods.

Near-term fatalities affect certain groups more than others. Those with access to medical services (or can pay for more of it) will be less affected.

Which side being worse is a determination you have to make for yourself.

Something to remember the next time people harp on about GDP being the most important metric for a country's advancement.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-02-recession-greater-dec...

So that, told me all I need to know about the cruelty and stupidity of the UK government at this time.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-deaths-trum...

Meanwhile, in the schools, the intention is to get the rate of kids that are immune as close to 100% as possible. That will be difficult without deliberately inoculating them, because they will develop herd immunity at about 66% in their population and it won't spread in that population anymore.

In the nuclear reactor analogy, it's as if you put in half the control rods, but only the ones on the left side of the reactor. That might make the left side strongly subcritical, but the right side might still be critical, even if with an even distribution of the same number of rods, the whole reactor would be subcritical.

This plan is not going to work and it will kill millions of people in Britain unless Chloroquine or something else ends up being a silver bullet for treatment.

so what about those who had to suffer to give this herd immunity? If i were a UK citizen, and i got infected, there's a non-zero chance that i will also need a ventilator. Any, even a tiny misstep will cause the numbers to grow beyond the amount of beds available. That i am asked to take this risk is absurd.

Full isolation and quarantine is a more conservative way - for myself at least. Even if the economic damage is severe.

Why? Politicians have shown several times that they prefer to listen to a minority of scientists that tell them what they want to hear, rather than a majority that doesn't.

I'd rather my top health officials actually have contact with those under them, than sit in a glass bubble.

Number of cases is a trailing indicator, which also only covers those tested.

It sounds more like you're at the bargaining stage now, rationalizing why it might be a good approach because it's happening and you hope for the best.

It sounds insane. Italy quite literally did the same model. Now they're in the worst of both -- mass quarantine / enormous economic damage AND the brutal human toll.

But I can see how it might make sense on a wider societal level, assuming everyone doesn't behave like me. (Which they don't, I've observed plenty of people complaining about how it's just 'media scaremongering' and 'just like Brexit'.)

I definitely think we're (almost every country is, save maybe Singapore) past containing it; so I can see how a relatively controlled exposure might actually be a good policy as far as managing resources, economy, and next season...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/epidem...

Except... A vaccine is expected to be ready in 12 months!

So the long term should be pain free either way!

The question is on the impact side. The reason this theory seems to work is that the seeming danger from COVID-19 is all on the elderly and immunocompromised. If you can prevent them from getting the same disease everyone else is, then they'll be protected by the herd -- new clusters won't form and infect them.

So this all comes down to those assumptions:

1. The virus is genuinely of low danger to the young and healthy

2. The vulnerable can be adequately protected during a pandemic of the general population

If either is wrong, we're looking at a staggering disaster. Are they wrong? We have no fucking idea. I'm not even on the continent and I'm terrified.

You're failing to take in consideration that the virus incubation period is on average 1 to 2 weeks, and those who manage to recover from the disease take about 2 weeks from diagnosis to confirmed cure.

This means that you're comparing 4 weeks of exponential growth with 2 weeks of constant recovery.

Sure, those who survived the disease will be immune afterwards. That's great for herd imunity. But the thing you fail to understand is that as the disease increases exponentially, when that time arrives the whole nation has already become infected, and it's too late by then because health services will be unable to cope with the demand and a lot of people will die due to lack of basic medical care.

No no, I understand that. But the thinking is, and it seems to be backed by data, that the health system will be able to cope with a full-population maximal pandemic, as long as it is limited to the much less vulnerable segments of the population. The ICUs in Italy and Hubei were filled, for the most part, with elderly patients. The math, such as it is, checks out.

The risk management analysis, again, is IMHO batshit crazy. But the theory seems about as sound as it could be given the data we have.

It really doesn't seem that you're getting it, because the whole point of this exercise is that it's quite patently obvious that no health care service in the world is able to keep 10 to 15% of their population in intensive care, which so far is the expected incidence of cases that require medical care.

If that was the case then no one would be bothered with yet another flu-like viral infection.

Among the general population!

Among people under 50, the best data we have is that the fraction needing ICU care is something like 0.2% (I think, I'd have to look it up again).

The intent is to quarantine the at-risk and let it propagate in the "safe". I genuinely think it's you who's failed to understand the plan. You're arguing against something that is not the stated UK policy.

I too think it's too risky, FWIW. I read a while ago there might be permanent damage as well, but maybe that was hocus.

Edit: Business Insider reported HK doctors found some people have 20-30% reduced lung capacity after recovery: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-recovery-damage-... (n=12)

Any chance you remember where you found this statistic? I have been looking for any details on hospitalization rates by age range, but haven't had luck so far.

Estimates are closer to 10% of the infected getting severe cases, and some small-ish fraction of those requiring intensive care. (The higher percentage numbers are usually an artifact of low testing rates of infected people.)

Also, epidemiology suggests that 20-70% will get it. So, we’re looking at ~1% of the population in the hospital at once.

The rest of your points stand; we don’t have nearly enough hospital capacity for 1% of the population.

Note that with a two week active phase, the pandemic would have to drag on for 20 weeks to get that number to 0.1%. I doubt there is capacity for that either.

"Sure, those who survived the disease will be immune afterwards." There have been reports of re-infections in China and Japan. This may be mistakes - the never were cured - but this could also point to something more severe. Proceed with caution.

Additionally, we know nothing of the long term effects even for the "young and healthy". Mortality rates for people 10-39 is 0.2%, 40-49 it's at 0.4%, 50-59 1.3%, 60-69 at 3.6%. Serious conditions develop in a bigger proportion of cases, so you are looking at 4-10% of under 60 population in ICU with unknown long term effects.

Translation: good luck!

According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/281174/uk-population-by-...

8.96 million aged 50-59, 7.07 million aged 60-69.

Ultimately, it’s a just a really inconsistent cold. The vast majority of cases are mild. However, if it spreads to the lungs, it’s worse than the flu.

As far as I know, there’s no evidence that it’s any more exotic than that.

1. Vaccines, immunitized people don't get sick in the process of imunization, don't need hospitalization, don't die

2. Slow and gradual imunization over multiple years.

Neither of this is uphold all other cases of herd imunization in history I'm aware of always had a massive price in human lives.

Also it only works if the virus doesn't mutate to much, party of the reason the flu is still around even through you would believe we got herd imunization in last many decades since the flu is a think.

> 1. The virus is genuinely of low danger to the young and healthy

Except it's not really that low it's only compared to old people low.

And it's close to practically impossible to only affect young people without having idk concentration camps for young people with strict separation from the older people (like over 20?,30?) for a duration of over a month and still 2 in 1000 or so dying. AND it's anyway to late for that measurements as it's already to widely spread in the UK eitherway.

The idea is that once a significant fraction of the population has some immunity to an infection, the ability of an infected person to spread the virus (a term called "R0" in the jargon) is fundamentally impeded by its ability to find infectable targets. So the R0 drops, and so does the exponent to the growth. Once that exponent goes below 1, the number of cases drops over time instead of growing, and new infection clusters can't start.

This works. It's why we don't have things like measles outbreaks (or didn't, until the anti-vax crowd messed things up) and why newly mutated flu strains can't find purchase and become pandemics.

Specifically with the GP, his argument is that herd immunity gaining through large percentage of the population being infected in a short amount of time is a bad idea. Normally we got herd immunity via vaccination of the population, since it is much safer than being infected. That's why vaccination was mentioned.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/15/uk-coronavirus...

Imagine going ahead with this instead of... doing something.

And no, the NHS doesn’t have the capacity to handle this. So...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-strategy...

This seems like a obviously bad idea.

Herd immunity is the goal for the UK government; they are explicitly saying they want ~60% of the population to get the virus. The only concern for the UK government is to space out the rate of infection so as to avoid overloading hospitals. So they are banning large gatherings, but not doing a lockdown per se, if that makes sense. Slow the pace, but let it continue. (They may do a strategic lockdown later if necessary to flatten the curve, but right now is certainly NOT the time to do a lockdown, according to their strategy, because at this stage it would be motivated by an attempt to "stop" the virus rather than an attempt to flatten the curve.)

(I've been doing the arithmetic for this stuff all day but here goes).

The UK's population is about 66 million. Sixty percent infected is 39,600,000. A 1% death rate (which, per above, you can't escape by "just infect young people" or something, jeesh) implies 396,000 dying. That many people dying, spread out evenly over a year is 1084 people dying per day but 10,840 people arrive sick at hospitals. Which is something the UK surely can't deal with. So with the health care system overwhelmed, the death goes to 5% or more and you have 2 millions deaths, much the WWII casualties etc.

Also, the "herd immunity" reasoning is wrong in the sense that we don't cultivate herd immunity to black plague, Ebola or small pox because they are deadly enough that we containment. Covids is in this special deadly "sweet spot" where it doesn't seem deadly enough to isolate in small area but too deadly to allow to run rampant across a city or nation. The answer that's forced on nation is mass city-by-city quarantine. Harsh but China's Wuhan experience was nowhere near the horrors that this "herd immunity" plan promises.

Herd immunity in this case isn't something you choose to cultivate or not. With such an infectious disease you're going to get it sooner or later; that's the UK's point. Trying to wipe it out through self isolation won't be globally 100% effective and if it's not it'll just come back. Ultimately only the population carrying lots of antibodies will end transmission for good.

I believe it's mistake to claim that the disease will inevitably become endemic in the fashion of the flu. It certainly reach that level but costs would be massively catastrophic in a multitude of fashions. Oppositely, that of the different nations who've contained the infection show that is possible to eliminate it from a region and so a world-wide effort could eliminate it world wide as well.

One factor is that the disease is much more deadly than the early commentators (notably in the Atlantic) believed and aside from making "everyone get infected, OK?" horrific, this gives a strong marker for the disease and a strong incentive to act.

This is a disease in which people can be infectious yet show no symptoms. How do you stop infected people moving between regions? Do you think a "world wide effort" is going to successfully encompass places like Africa, central Asia, even Latin America? It's out now, it'll be circulating for a long time.

Also, it becoming seasonal could also be a self fulfilling prophecy due to its policy.

Once a vaccine that works is out I’m sure most of the world will get it. The lockdown is all about preventing (early) deaths.

It is unclear if you can continue playing whack-a-mole with quarantine measures for the next 1-2 years. It's possible but unlikely, at least in the West.

The UK's gambit is that by timing stricter quarantine measures they can cut the head off the peak, while slowing down spread due to some immunity in the population. This may work if the risk groups can indeed self-isolate for 4 months, and if more ventilators can be manufactured at speed.

It will still be devastating.

It will be interesting to see what happens in China after people return to work.

Either way, I think we are looking at bans on international travel to continue for many months to come.

You are NOT flattening jack shit by having all your young population become infected!! [0]

They are NOT gonna mass transport ALL the elderly population to a far away island and isolate them there, they all are gonna get infected and the NHS is going to collapse because of it

There already have been cases documented of people getting infected because of unsealed bathroom toilet pipes on apartment buildings... [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/C98FmoZVbjs?t=693

[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...

I haven't seen anyone address this concern among the people who think the UK's strategy is insane.

Yes, if you lock down society, you will halt the spread of the virus dramatically.

But for how long? When do you lift the lock down? When it's died out in your country? How long will that take? What if it hasn't died out elsewhere? Are you going into another lock down right on the heels of the first one?

And how do you get people to comply with it? Hell, there's plenty of people in the US who are completely convinced that the coronavirus is a hoax or a conspiracy or something something Trump Democrats Obama Liberal But Her Emails. Less than two weeks ago President Trump called the thing a hoax!

The UK strategy takes this into account and rolls with it. They know it's going to infect a majority of the population eventually, so let's just get it over with as quickly as possible, while protecting the vulnerable in society, and then herd immunity kicks in and after that your country is protected no matter what other countries do.

They are about slowing it, so that the load on the health care system isn't too grade.

Current data show that dath ratio in case of slow spread can be reduced to 1%, potential even less. While with overload it's more like 5% and with collapsing overload even potentially more.

Also work slowing the number of total infected people without usable medicine against it can potentially be drastically reduced. Especially if we find some usable but imperfect medicine in the near time which reduces ICU cases.

Also let's remember 1918:

The first wave killed the old, the second wave killed the young, the third wave killed without discrimination.

I.e. we are still in the first wave, it's not impossible that a mutation occurred which makes it especially deadly against the young (through maybe quite unlike). Just consider what happens if that overlaps with the UK plans and they notice it to late. It would be a lost generation.

Again, the load on the health care system depends completely on the demographics of the people who get infected.

By isolating and quarantining people in risk groups, the load on the health care system will be much lower.

The gamble is this: By letting the virus spread indiscriminately through the part of the population that is not at risk, the load on the health care system will be manageable, the death rate will be nowhere near the current measured ones, and once the virus has passed, you have herd immunity in your population.

But if you argue for harsh lock down of everything now, you are also gambling. You are gambling that you can delay the spread until there is a vaccine, without knowing how far away a vaccine is. You are gambling that all the other countries get a handle on the virus, without knowing if they will.

Actually, there is. The UK strategy explicitly aims to avoid a peak come autumn/winter, you want it to go through enough of the population before summer ends. Too fast and it overwhelms the NHS right now, too slow and it will overwhelm the NHS in November.

I completely agree that it is a risky strategy, but unlike the general sentiment in this thread, I don't think it's an obviously bad strategy, and I absolutely think that everyone arguing against it are also engaging in a lot of wishful thinking regarding people's willingness to self-quarantine and obey government recommendations aimed at containing it.

Try harsh containment measures in the US, and 20% of the population is going to go "fuck you it's a Democratic hoax/Chinese conspiracy/Deep State population control scheme, nothing's gonna stop me!"

At least the UK strategy takes the unwillingness of the population into accord, locking down all retirement homes is much more doable than locking down everything.

The NHS is already overwhelmed. Right now. We are firmly in "too fast" territory. There is no amount containment, starting from now, that will be too much - the exponential growth is already getting away.

Also, why would that be less viable than locking down all of society the way for example Italy has done?

This isn't really a plan, it's mostly wishful thinking. We expect herd immunity to kick in at around 60% prevalence, which in the UK would be ~38 million cases. ~10% of cases require hospitalisation, so that's ~3.8 million hospital admissions. At the last count, NHS England had a grand total of 4123 critical care beds. Unless we remain in isolation for the best part of a decade, the healthcare system is going to be substantially overwhelmed and care will have to be rationed.

We may get a vaccine, but that'll take at least 12 months and we don't know how well it'll work; until we know how rapidly SARS-CoV-2 mutates, we can't assume that a vaccine would end the epidemic. It is a strong possibility that COVID-19 will become a regular seasonal affliction like influenza.

There are no good options and we're not even sure which are the least bad options. Strict isolation measures will kick the problem down the road for a while, but at the risk of a whole bunch of other problems. How long will people tolerate being confined to their homes? How long can the economy withstand a huge reduction in productivity and spending? What happens if the lockdown fails and social unrest occurs just in time for the next winter flu season?

We need a lockdown to buy us some time, but we also need to face up to the reality that a lockdown isn't a solution but merely a stopgap.

That depends on the demographics that get infected! Stop pulling these numbers out of your asses as if they're universally true!

That number is based on the virus hitting everyone equally, and central to the UK strategy is that you avoid that, that you instead quarantine and isolate the at-risk people, and build herd immunity among the remainder, not among the entire general population.

This entire post and all the comments is one giant "holy crap the UK strategy is bananas!", but it seems no-one understands the rationale behind it!

Come on! There are legit arguments against it, but your argument isn't it!

> We need a lockdown to buy us some time, but we also need to face up to the reality that a lockdown isn't a solution but merely a stopgap.

The whole mad point of the UK strategy is that you'll reach herd immunity without massive hospitalisation and death, and that once you're through it, you're done, the virus will die out in the UK, no matter what the state the rest of the world is in, no matter when a vaccine is finished, no matter if other countries fight intermittent outbreaks or not.

I’m neither epidemiologist nor politician in power, so I can entertain myself with these thought experiments. In the end, I have little choice (and knowledge or firepower), but to do as instructed by local authorities.

If the government was implementing a plan that they had considered and prepared over a number of years, carefully assessed the evidence and weighed the options? Costs and benefits have been weighed and it is hard to ask for more.

Government has no idea what is happening and it decides to go in and see how bad it is? Not a great time to prioritise the non-essential parts of the economy.

A lot of people seem to be focusing on mortality rate, but data from China and Italy show that people who get severe symptoms, but survive COVID-19 will live with lifelong scares, that make them vulnerable for say the next flu season.

So while 0.1-1% may die, we are talking about upwards of 10% of people being put out of commission. It's also wrong to say that younger people aren't hurt by this, there are plenty of young people with chronic illnesses, and limited immune systems. And even if they do survive, it may not be worth living.

It's not as simple. GDP per capita is strongly correlated with life expectancy. In other words, people die sooner with worse economy.

On an individual level, i would not want this, even if it's "better" for the UK in the long run. As an individual, it's unacceptable for me to take this sort of risk, and i would not agree to it if i had a choice.

I'll use US numbers, because I know them.

The current worst case scenarios on the table are between 1% and 5% of the individuals catching the disease dying (there are better numbers, but we're worst casing it). For achieving herd immunity, numbers like 40-70% of the population infected and recovered are bandied about.

So worst case, you're looking at 1.3-11.6 million deaths in the US.

Now, the US government values the lives of its citizens at $7-9 million dollars a piece.

That puts the economic cost of this strategy, in the US, at $9.1-104 trillion dollars.

That dwarfs what is happening in the stock market right now; shutting down the entire US economy for a year makes sense when faced with that magnitude of potential loss.

I assume the math is similar elsewhere.

Yes, those numbers apply if it spreads indiscriminately throughout your entire population.

But we know the virus is here, we know who is in the risk group, which means that if you isolate and self-quarantine people in the risk group, and let the virus slowly roll through the rest of the population, you will get a much lower death rate.

There's a ton of variables that determine the death rate, and yet everyone is just staring themselves blind at the first best numbers we have. No. Come on. It depends on the quality of the care available, it depends on the knowledge of doctors who have experience with it, but most importantly it depends on the demographics of the people who get infected.

> shutting down the entire US economy for a year makes sense

Except "the economy" is made up of millions of individuals. Some will still have an ok quality of life, but many people won't. They'll be fired, or their companies will have gone bankrupt, they'll have no money, no food.. Then what? Do you think hungry people won't food riot just because there's a quarantine? Or go stir crazy? Or ignore it? Or spread propaganda that the entire thing is a hoax so that the New World Order can take over?

The point isn't to actually shut down the entire economy.

The point is that when you are talking loss numbers in the trillions, interventions that cost hundreds of billions or even "smaller numbers of trillions" to avert the big losses make economic sense; helicopter dropping a trillion dollars to allow people besides tech workers to self-isolate and socially distance themselves for a few months could be cheap, in the long run.

The main part of my argument above is that you pulled that number out of your ass, you didn't address any of my points against why that number is baseless, yet you continue using the number.

Your number is a worst-case "cost" of doing absolutely nothing and just letting people die, and then you say that your suggested strategy of dumping cash on the population is much cheaper. While true in itself, the error is that you're equating the UK strategy with the worst-case doing-nothing strategy, and that therefore your strategy is better.

The case for the UK strategy is that by letting the virus spread uncontrolled through the not at risk population, health care systems won't ever be overwhelmed, death rates will be much, much lower than current measured ones, and you'll emerge on the other side with a herd immune population, without doing too much damage to your economy, and the at-risk population won't ever get infected in the first place. And by doing that, the total death toll will be lower, than having the virus slowly go through the entire population, at-risk or not.

Sounds excellent. Did we remember to tell the virus?

At the very least, we have a current floor that 0.002% of the total Italian population has died from the disease so far; conversely, we know a minimum of 21,157 have contracted it in the same population, and 1,966 have recovered, so the mortality rate is probably less than 90%.

Now those two numbers are very far apart, so you might be inclined to wait and see whether the final number will lie, but the problem with that is, once the final number is known, it is too late to act.

We either have the option of acting now, as seems best with our current information, and correcting course as the new information reveals itself, or doing nothing at all, and waiting for better information, and our current information says that doing nothing at all is not the best option.

Wait, where does that figure come from?

Delaying the pain by a month or two could well be an extremely good move.

I wouldn't take those odds.

This just isn’t true. The definition of an economy is a system to determine the production and allocation of scarce resources.

To the extent that those resources include food, shelter, and other elements required to stay alive then the economy literally is the determinant of life and death.

Furthermore, significant contractions of economic activity cause death in measurable predictable ways.

All of this closing down of the economy is — literally — killing people as we speak.

I'm thinking this only makes sense in the context of Brexit. Brexit will be a massive hit to the competitiveness of British businesses... somebody in government is hoping to counteract this by taking an approach different to the rest of Europe. If the UK's approach works, it will end up economically ahead of all the other European countries, something like the US post-WWII (but to a lesser extent).

Bad theory. This virus could have been used as an excuse to lock down borders while the rest of Europe got economically destroyed by the virus.

Some communities will have too many cases, but most will hopefully be ok. And we will have a first step of Hurd immunity, concentrated on people most likely to transmit later like package delivery, restaurant workers, drivers etc.

The US should have had testing procedure set up early to relieve stress for citizens.

How is that not a bad strategy? By this point the disease will have some sort of transmission inertia, so establishing containment just before hospitals are overrun pretty much guarantees they will be overrun.

Math was known and the results fall on our politicians

Herd immunity means something like 60% of the population get it and maybe 1.3 million Americans die ghastly deaths.

I don't think the risk of this pandemic approach is worthwhile, especially given how poorly the EU is doing in general. Terrible economy, catastrophic pandemic response, and the symbolism of countries closing borders on fellow EU states are all quite telling.

By contrast Britain almost seems like it dodged a bullet - although they seem to have jumped in front of a train instead with their pandemic gamble.

I think that their strategy is more smoke and mirrors - they're looking for the massive uproar so that the public understands that what we're facing is the real deal and will accept the harsh restrictions to freedom better once they have to be made.

The damage caused by an extra day or two of waiting will be small in comparison to the benefits of good compliance.

Plus don't forget that it's the weekend. No schools. The schools won't be open on Monday.

Dominic Cummings and his team are sharp and extremely good at manipulating the exact group of unthinking idiots who would otherwise ignore curfews and restrictions..

I should also add: all of the other Western countries are doing the same thing, UK included. Do whatever is possible to keep the health system working until. Eventually you get herd immunity either via people getting it or a vaccination.

The UK government has increased spending by £30B, £12B to be spent on tackling COVID 19.

The Bank of England has suggested lending £190B to businesses in need.

The roughly equivalent numbers appear to be 12B and 600B (Euros) for Germany.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/11/budget-2020-...

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/2020/march/boe-measures...

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/coronavirus-germa...

https://www.pionline.com/markets/germany-lines-600-billion-v...

It's exactly the same as everything that's being done, no one knows what's best, they are all creative or none are.

We have no idea what the downsides are for massive lockdowns. Look at the deaths that happened over summer in Britain when the heatwave struck. What will happen to the elderly in a lockdown?

Lockdowns are not conservative. They are what the rest of the world's doing so they are politically conservative for weak governments.

Following others lead is only political conservative. It's the learned behaviour of risk managers, push responsibility to others even if it's not the best action. They are there to manage internal risk.

Many sectors will crumble, it will ripple through the economy like dominos, credit dries up, investment halts, you get into an economic death spiral. There's very real possibility existential meltdown which will indirectly cause a lot of pain and death.

So 'lockdown' is 'conservative' from the viral perspective, from any other perspective, it's 'very risky'.

Covid19 will unfortunately kill a lot of people. As a silver-lining, it may also kill populism.