Ollie wrote:Incidentally, regarding the "herd immunity" strategy that they're supposedly no longer pursuing:
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/09/leak ... 19-anyway/
Comes as no surprise really that the strategy still appears to be to allow 80% of us to get it, just to spread it out enough that the NHS can cope with as little increased resources as they can get away with.
As I've said before, you don't aim for "herd immunity".
It's something that'll eventually naturally come about anyway. This is a total non-plan.
It's like aiming for natural selection to happen or for gravity to work. You don't have to do that, it'll inevitably happen anyway, as it simply can't not happen by the rules of logic and the universe.
We should aim for eradication. And, note, that's not at all impossible with viruses: Smallpox is extinct. Polio is very close to extinction, clinging on to small pockets in Africa.
And, right now, as bad as things look, we have the best opportunity we'll ever have to do it. As we have most of the world under simultaneous lockdown, with something that's attempting to establish itself but isn't endemic just yet.
In theory, if every country on planet Earth can reach zero new cases for a couple of weeks (plus a couple more to be sure and allow any viruses on surfaces out there to degrade away) simultaneously - and that truly represents a fortnight of absolutely no new infections then, that's it, it's extinct.
Granted, that's a tall order. But this is not an all or nothing. As mentioned, Polio clings to existence in small pockets of Africa. Smallpox, before it, did the same for a while. Even if total elimination isn't achieved, we could get it so damn close to that, that it ceases to be a problem for most of the world and where it clings on, we can, over the years, have a push to eliminating it completely (as is happening with Polio now).
The point is, give it a shot. If it doesn't work out, then we're back at "herd immunity" as the default position anyway.
(And, more over, I'll stress again that what we're doing is generic anti-viral techniques with "social distancing". It's not just coronavirus we're beating back here, but all of the socially communicable viruses are getting clobbered by this simultaneously. In beating back "the big bad" here, we're implicitly also kicking the arse out of "the lesser bads" right now as well. Coronavirus has a longer incubation period than nearly any other virus, so if we can beat this right back, then we might find the less hardy viruses will succumb to that punishment to their means of continued survival long before it. If we push, then we might find the world has a few less strains of the flu or the common cold out there. And, hey, economically: Less sick days off work for everyone.)
Regarding the economy, what we very much need are those antibody tests. Because then we can pick out who's already had it and has immunity to it, and those folks can break "social distancing" and go back to work and normality. With immunity, these people would be safe to go back on the frontline, into care homes and so forth. That's the real way out of lockdown, in a manner that doesn't risk any re-emergence of the virus.
(Yes, some people have worried that this would create a "two tier" system, with some people stuck in lockdown and others not. But, well, that's just the reality we face. The folks in lockdown are there for their own benefit, and the folks outside of lockdown are there because they got this, survived and now, with immunity, should no longer pose a threat to infecting anyone else. You wouldn't design a system this way, perhaps, but it's forced on us by the facts of the reality we face.)
We were promised these antibody tests "within days", but then they were put on the back burner, as their reliability was not deemed up to scratch. But, nonetheless, keep working on it until they are good enough - I mean, this was a "first go" on a completely brand new virus, so it would have been impressive if they had got it 100% on the first attempt - and I'd love to know in what exact way they were unreliable and to what degree. False positives would be bad, as that would put vulnerable people out of lockdown. But false negatives we could tolerate, as it just means folks who could actually be out of lockdown aren't identified as such, and end up stuck indoors when they strictly don't need to be - which ain't ideal, but it's workable, as long as it doesn't potentially encourage the spread of the infection.
The UK government's own science adviser said it: "don't let perfection be the enemy of the good". The test results can be treated as "advisory" and not sacrosanct.
For example, if someone had covid symptoms - so they reckon they've had it - and they come back positive for antibodies 3 times in a row, with tests spaced a week apart, then the odds are that they've had it and are now immune. But it's "advisory", as we know the tests ain't 100%, so if we're not entirely confident - and the person themselves does not consent to take that risk - then they stay in lockdown.
Because, remember, the default here is that we have absolutely everyone everywhere in a blanket ban, as we don't know who's who at all and, thus, have to treat absolutely everyone as "susceptible". But, as this goes on, there's more and more people who've had it and recovered - not that the bloody government has seemingly bothered to keep track of this properly - and those people should be good to go back to work (even with this revelation of potential "re-activation", if they're strictly amongst those who've already had it and have immunity, outside of lockdown, this doesn't encourage the spread).
In the midst of all this - and all the worry - it is worth remembering that the majority of people - in all age brackets - will recover. Currently, at time of writing, we have 1.7 million cases and 404K recoveries (well, from those countries that bother tracking recoveries anyway). Eventually, these numbers will flip and "recovered" will outnumber "confirmed cases". We need a way to safely identify and release the immune back to normality, keeping everyone else in the lockdown.
There is a plan here. The WHO recommendations make sense. Eradication is possible - it's been done with viruses before - and if we fail at that, then we're back to "herd immunity" as the default anyway, so why not give it a shot? And even if we don't get total eradication, then we could still get damn close to it, consigning it to a "dull roar" in the background, with ongoing work to find those small pockets of resistance and flush them out (when the population of infected is tiny, then we can very much do the pro-active testing and contract tracing shit to lock it down fast - which we should have been doing, a la South Korea and Germany, in the first place. But, this time, governments know to take this perfectly seriously and that it's NOT helping the economy in the slightest to wave it off as "just the flu" - if we'd had all international flights stopped, ramping up of testing before it hit, etc. then we'd have this under control by now. It's not "health versus the economy" here, that's a false dichotomy - the economy, as we're seeing, just can't function properly and requires insane "bail outs" to prop up, so we must sort the health problem or we won't get the economy back on its feet. Lift the lockdowns prematurely, and it'll come back with a vengeance, and you'll be forced back into lockdown again. But keep with this current lockdown until we have squashed this bugger right down, and then we can lift it with much less chance of re-emergence, that it can remain open. It's not just the right thing to do for health, it's the right thing to do economically - because businesses can't function if all their employees are off sick and / or dead).
This is just a bizarre perfectly unnecessary surrender. You don't aim for "herd immunity". You aim for better than that - and you'll end up with "herd immunity" by default anyway, whatever you do, if this can't be managed in the longer term.
Like, eventually, all of us are going to die. Death is inevitable. But this doesn't mean immediately jumping out of a 16th storey window to bring about your death right now. You attempt to stay alive and keep living. You'll eventually fail, in good time - and perhaps these efforts will eventually fail to control it in the longer term - but you give it a bloody good go in the meantime, right?
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage rage against the dying of the light"
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
