(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.
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.)