According to this article the UK government strategy for dealing with the Coronavirus is not entirely clear, but it seems that the strategy is to allow the virus to spread slowly through the population so it can be handled more easily and not overload the hospitals. Jeremy Rossman, a virologist, believes this strategy is likely to be a disaster.
Achieving herd immunity would require well over 47 million people to be infected in the UK. Current estimates are that COVID-19 has a 2.3% case-fatality rate and a 19% rate of severe disease. This means that achieving herd immunity to COVID-19 in the UK could result in the deaths of more a million people with a further eight million severe infections requiring critical care.
Even if we manage to protect the most vulnerable people (though no discussion is provided on how this will be done or for how long) the fatality rate for the otherwise healthy portion of the population may still be 0.5% or higher. This means that even in this unlikely “best case” scenario we would still be looking at more than 236,000 deaths.
Jeremy Rossman - Coronavirus: can herd immunity really protect us?, by Jeremy Rossman
2 comments:
This virus is sufficiently contagious that its spread cannot be prevented, only slowed.
Rossman doesn't seem to be aware that the reason China has managed to significantly slow down the spread is that it has powers which governments in normal democratic countries just don't have.
As for "herd immunity" that's what will happen ANYWAY. I.e. it's just the UK government's fancy way of saying "We can't control this to any great extent, so what will happen is what happens when any disease spreads thru a population of lions, tigers, cats, you name it: the "herd" eventually becomes immune".
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