Herd immunity still the policy

What other way is there to beat it? Build up a resistance in the public or spend our lives hidden away hoping for a vaccine?
 
To be fair, herd immunity may be all we are left with as it can take a long time to develop a vaccine. However, if you are going to do that you have to have policies in place that protect the most vulnerable, and, given the lack of care home support, I don't see a lot of evidence of this coming out of downing street.
 
I know lives are more important than money, no question, but a flat-lining economy, wide(r) spread poverty and food shortages are going to cost lives as well. I honestly don't know which way forward is best.
 
US centric with a bit of Merkel thrown in , but the perfect explanation of the balancing act between the economy and public health which I keep bringing up.

I am in no position, information wise, to say what is right and what is wrong, but we have to have some faith that our leaders will do what is best and if the r goes to 1 that they'll put us all back in lockdown.

Regardless, it'll be how the public act that will have the biggest bearing on the reoccurrence of the virus and we all need to embrace whatever becomes the new normal and make social distancing and personal hygiene our priorities so that we don't become the week link in the chain.

 
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In using that video to justify using the word 'cull' in the headline the OP demonstrates his agenda and low intellect. LWDB.
 
The problem with herd immunity that it's advocates ignore is that it results in the death of many more people. Why? Because if you let the virus run rampant the hospitals will be overwhelmed and those that could be saved under normal circumstances die through lack of basic medical attention. The only way to proceed is to ensure that the hospitals never get into that position by whatever means it takes. To do anything less is to me criminal.
 
The numbers of new cases suggest the lock down is only partly working. By the time they introduced the lock down the virus was already widespread throughout the country. Also explains why they didn't stop overseas travel as done by countries with the best numbers. So contrary to what some have said, I don't think the government did a U turn based on the Imperial study. It must always have been part of the plan to lock down if the virus spread more quickly than initially expected in order to protect the NHS.

It's not difficult math to work out the potential spread of a virus with an R0 of 3 and an incubation period of around 5 days with maximum spread on day 3 or 4. Only takes 6 or 7 weeks to spread to most of the country. If we use figures from the Californian and German studies, or from the Iceland antigen testing numbers, we get a mortality rate of 0.6% or even lower (assuming some level of social distancing). Apply that to the current number of deaths and you get something around 5 million infected in the country. With numbers from Germany of 15% infected where only 5% had tested positive after contact tracing (and they've had good antigen testing), we get almost 10 million infected. Not herd immunity but well on the way.

We should know more when the large scale testing program of the population as a whole reports. But as I understand it the current study it will still show only those currently infected. Not those who were infected earlier.
 
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coluka said:
Where is the proof that immunity exists? I have not seen any proof as yet, so do not buy the theory quite yet
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If there was no immunity, then wouldn't we have hundreds of thousands of people who were continuously ill? People do recover from this disease, which suggests their immune system rids the virus from their system. I would guess quite a number of health care workers are already living proof that there is some immunity. How long it lasts is the big question. But isn't that just as true of a most types of vaccine. I thought the idea for at least one type of vaccine was to simulate the virus with a benign copy that would stimulate the bodies immune system to create antibodies.
 
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motownjunk said:
Herd immunity naturally takes a long time sometimes generations.
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With a virus that spreads as quickly as Covid-19 I doubt that would be the case. In an unprotected population it spreads very quickly.

I believe the herd immunity threshold is (R0 - 1)/R0 or 1-1/R0. Which makes Covid-19 immunity reached somewhere between 62% and 67%. Still not as bad as measles. It's R0 is between 12 and 18.
 
CV19 will be different to Spanish Flu, but they are the only pandemic we have had in modern times. Spanish Flu was in Europe from around March 1918 to June 1919, although there were still some deaths in early 1920, so there was some sort of herd immunity after 15 months of the virus. There was no vaccine. It was believed around 30% of the population caught the flu with around 0.5% of the UK population died from it (228,000). Like CV19, Spanish Flu was deadly because partly because it spread so quickly and it quickly attacked the lungs, in some cases an infected Spanish flu person was dead within 24 hours of catching the virus, turning their lungs into a rice crisper.

Like BR14 I believe over 10% of the UK population has been infected, most without fully realising it. We know the virus was in the UK in early to mid February so it probably infected a lot of people before lock down officially started on March 24th.
 
Redwurzel said:
they are the only pandemic we have had in modern times
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I learned the other day that in 1957 there was a pandemic known as Asian flu. Worldwide it is supposed to have killed 1.1 million people after two waves, including 116,000 in the US alone. In the first wave, 14,000 people died in the UK within six months. Not sure about the following year when the second wave hit.

So perhaps it didn't spread as quickly as Covid-19, but ultimately the death toll seems to be in the same range. Eventually a vaccine was developed that stopped the disease spread.

I also read that Spanish flu was similar to Covid-19 in that they believe it triggered a cytokine storm causing massive inflammation in the lungs. It primarily affected younger people - though that might have just been due to the effects of the war.
 
coluka said:
Where is the proof that immunity exists? I have not seen ay proof as yet, so do not buy the theory quite yet
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I mentioned this on another thread but I think it's misleading to consider immunity as being an either/or situation. Immunity isn't something where you either have it and you're totally protected or you don't have it and you're totally unprotected. Instead, the body's immune response varies on a sliding scale.

Every time your body is exposed to a pathogen, it generates an immune response. Sometimes the immune response is strong, efficient and long-lasting but at the other end of the scale it's sometimes weak, ineffective and short-lived.

What we don't know yet is where on this scale, the immune response to CoVid-19 lies but it seems likely that it's somewhere in between these two extremes. On the other thread I posted a link to a video from an epidemiologist who says she suspects the immune response to CoVid-19 may be similar to SARS and MERS, where an infected person is resistant for at least several months and possibly for as long as a year. But as she says, we can't know yet as it's just too early to get definitive data.

Incidentally, there has been some encouraging news in this field just recently - as reported over on the "Coronavirus good news" thread, a recent study of hundreds of apparent re-infections in South Korea found that they were in fact false positives, where dead fragments of the virus that were incapable of replication, still existed in a person's body.
 
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