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.
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.