Originally Posted by
wigbam
Too often nowadays I hear is "government should do this" and "government should do that". And what happened to individual responsibility and critical thinking? If you were not able to see where this whole thing was going and making necessary preparations for you and your family in advance (even as late as two/three weeks ago) then you haven't been paying attention. A few extra loo rolls would have been a good start.
Population lockdown in hope of getting rid of the CV-19 would not work. It will re-appear as soon as the lockdown is lifted. Unless, of course, you totally northkoreanise yourself and shutdown all borders for years. Hence whatever Europe is doing now is akin to hanging oneself in order to prevent catching a cold (pun intended). These measures will no doubt be successful in killing the economy while perhaps slow down the spread of the virus at best. The economic ramifications (i.e. people suffering and dying) from the shutdown will be far worse than from the virus itself. And we are already beginning to see that with all those bankruptcies, redundancies, pensions disappearing etc.
The only sensible approach is to accept CV-19 as a new reality and attempt to mitigate its spread which is what UK and US so far is trying to do - encourage(enforce?) groups at risk (seniors, people with pre-conditions etc.) to self-isolate perhaps with some help from the government but let the healthy majority continue spinning the economic wheel while taking certain pre-cautions.
Critical thinking suggests that this won't work.
Advice is that anyone advised to get a flu shot is in the "vulnerable " class. That's the over 65s plus others. Take up among the over 65s is around 70% and they make up ~20% of the population. They take about 2/3 of the advisory flu shots. Adding in the other 1/3, as a rough estimate, you end up with 30-40% of the population being in an at risk group and self-isolating.
To get to the point where there is sufficient general herd immunity to protect them (>60% of the total poulation), you need essentially everyone else to have it and become permanently immune to reinfection. There is no evidence that being infected once gives you lifelong protection (it's not automatic), but let's assume it does. (If it doesn't this strategy would be utterly wrong, so it's a gamble anyway.) To get total population herd immunity (so the vulnerable could come out of isolation) you would still have to deliberately infect robust people in a systematic way (since they would develop "internal herd" immunity while the vulnerable were isolated and not relevant to transmission).
You would have to keep leakage to the isolated group at a level that didn't, with the lower rate of severe cases from the over 30s but under 65s, overstress the NHS. If you keep the infection rate low enough to preserve the NHS from the effect of serious cases, it takes years to get to the herd immunity state in the UK.
The correct "critical thinking" strategy is to delay spread and work towards a treatment or a vaccine. This is likely to take 6-12 months. It may involve several periods of lockdown because, as you note, it is likely to re-emerge. However, governments are not likely to make the same mistake again, and will clamp down on cases. much faster, so lockdown could be more regional and/or shorter.