I know that's what he said. What I am saying that that is not the strategy. When herd immunity was mentioned by Patrick Vallance he explicitly said it was about developing it among the healthy that would have a mild reaction to it and explicitly mentioned shielding the vulnerable. These 400,000 figures are taking into account 60% of everyone getting infected. That's not what's being proposed here.
You're way off. It's not low at all. Most uptodate models we have today have shown it actually might end up being less than 1%. Sage have said they fully expect it to be between 0.5-1%.
OK, so say the death rate is in the range 0.5% to 1%. That would be 200k to 400k, which is pretty much the range of outcomes Imperial predicted with the various mitigation strategies. At this point it's just a question of basic numeracy. You have stated the policy is to allow 60% overall infection, but there is no world where that doesn't result in hundreds of thousands of deaths. The policy has changed to try and avoid that outcome.
No, mitigation is no longer the strategy. I've corrected this misconception numerous times yet it keeps being ignored. And of course the young "can" be hospitalised from the infection. The young also "can" be hospitalised from flu. The young also "can" be hospitalised from wisdom teeth complications etc..point is were are talking about a extremely rare occurrence and every single piece of research unanimously backs that up.
This here shows that you don't understand population statistics. A difference of 0.1% and 0.01% on a population level is huge. Hospitalisation is rare on an individual level, but staggering on a population level. Even with 60% infection limited to under 65s spread out over 18 months, it would overwhelm the critical care capacity in the NHS by at least a factor of two. That's assuming all beds were allocated for COVID patients btw, and not accounting for the fact that something like 90% of critical care beds are currently taken. So, given that I think the real number is something like a factor of 10.
On a population level, COVID is significantly more dangerous than the flu, even amongst the young. Your comparison is dangerous and disingenuous.
As I pointed out above, 1% is not a generous estimation with the most uptodate figures we have. And the policy change was from mitigation to suppression. Herd immunity is not exclusive to either one and is actually stated as a factor in the success of either of them.
Again, you're wrong here. The Imperial report only discussed herd immunity in context of mitigation. They admit that a problem with suppression is that there is no herd immunity, and so suppression and extensive controls have to continue for many months (maybe 5+).
The current recommendation is not to acquire herd immunity through 60% infection over any timescale. The current policy is suppression to get the retransmission rate R₀ to as close or below 1 as possible.
Look, I appreciate you're doing your best to read all this and keep yourself informed. I get it - it's all very confusing. It doesn't help that the govt has basically done a total U-turn this week either.
So, lets do this in summary. If 60% of people in the UK get infected at 0.5% mortality then 200k people die. Everyone agrees that's unacceptable. So, the policy has now changed to get the retransmission rate as close to 1 as possible, or ideally beneath 1.
Also, COVID is incredibly dangerous. There is no mild COVID, not even for young people. Comparisons to flu are dangerous and disingenuous. This last point it something I really want to get you to agree on - herd immunity means thousands of people, even young people, die before their time.
www.theguardian.com
www.thepoke.co.uk
