albion:
I’ve just been away on a walking holiday with a friend whose opinion is that hard immunity makes sense. As she has a Masters in biology and is well respected in her field, I’ll go with her take on the subject rather than random carp from facebook.
Its not merely some nutters saying the herd immunity “plan” is suspect: most other countries are taking a different view, and the WHO seem to believe more action is advisable.
metro.co.uk/2020/03/14/world-he … -12397312/
You`re certainly correct there is a lot of smelly fish out there, but there is valid doubt about this policy.
muckles:
Franglais:
The Gov say they are acting on expert advice. Some advisors will be seeking to keep everywhere open to keep financial situation buoyant. Some will want a close down to slow infection rates, so our struggling under resourced medics can cope.
Some experts think an early lock down will result in selfish, know-it-all people getting bored and breaking it. Wonder how they got that idea?
There are experts advising, but the choices are made by politicians. Our leading politician is…Well…
.
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Edit. To spell it out, herd immunity will come after we are all infected. Some plan.
from my understanding Herd Immunity doesn’t require the whole “herd” to be immune, this was on the Royal Institute Lectures at Christmas, (before all this started) they used the audience to model how it works, however the percentage that needs to be immune depends on how infectious the disease is.
As far as I understand without a a vaccine the only rapid way of stopping the disease is a total lockdown for long enough to stop the virus spreading through the population, (that could be up to a month according to some reports of how long it might be infectious for) and even China, a far more totalitarian system, couldn’t manage that, so what chance do we have? When they tried it in Northern Italy some people ignored it and left the area.
And what happens after the lock down and because of some ignoring it or someone coming form abroad the virus is still active, we’re back at square one, with a population who would no doubt rebel against another lockdown, so after all the pain of a total lockdown you’d still end up with a spike of cases and a collapse of the health care system.
So are the options are to either let it run rampant and spike quickly, but have a higher mortality because no Health Service could cope or a slower transmission through the population, so the Health Service has a chance to cope with those that need it, but this might take months and again will the population accept society being closed down for the that long, so bring in the restriction slower, but try and get infectious people and those most at risk of complications out of contact with other people.
The truth is this is unprecedented, so whatever any Government of any political party did or whatever one set of medical expects say, there will be another group saying its the wrong action. However scientists have warned about this happening for many years, but as a global society we have become complacent about what we have in terms of freedom of travel, global supply chains etc and this has shown how vulnerable they can be to something so simple,
I won`t argue with most of that.
But we have had IMHO a bit of poor info from our Gov. Earlier they have been saying, no need for at risk groups to self isolate. They now seem to say they should. Maybe this is a bit of population manipulation, by the “nudgers”? Releasing and tweaking advice to suit the population as a whole, but not necessarily the best advice for each individual?
I do accept that with limited info advice will change, and any/all choices will be based on imperfect models, but I find it hard to reconcile the current strategy with the current knowledge.
Agreed we cant expect to get a true lock-down such as in China. And maybe Ive been reading it wrong, but when told to stay home or avoid unnecessary contact, I thought most of us would. However looking at some of the selfish posts from others in other threads there seems to be little or no sense of community left. And/Or everyone is (as Albion alludes to) believing random FaceBook rubbish.
Seems to me that maybe herd immunity will be the best we can hope for? But thinking this is a “good plan” is stretching things somewhat? It may be more of a description of what may be the course the juggernaut, rather than someone saying they are deliberately steering it this way.
For anyone with a bit of spare time…since some of us are spending time in isolation, maybe 
…here are some of what I`ve found to be useful.
Firstly FullFact, the number of false stories, misreporting, and general nonsense floating around is frightening and they look at some of it:
fullfact.org/health/wuhan-coron … m=trending
For whatCOVID 19 really is: Inside Science.
bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000g3gf
And for what we were discussing about herd immunity in this case here are some other views, not all critical at all:
sciencemediacentre.org/expe … -immunity/
