A few thoughts on the last few pages, which may or may not be of interest.
Herd immunity. The number of people who have so far had covid-19 and so have immunity is thought to be relatively low. The percent required for herd immunity is high. From what i have read, a relatively optimistic scenario might be that 6% have so far been infected and 60% is needed for herd immunity, so we would be talking about 10 times as many people having to die before herd immunity is achieved. As the numbers are likely to be worse than that, immunity may only be limited, some people may not fully recover, the strain on the NHS will likely mean that there will be lower ability to deal with, say, cancer patients, this means that the death toll could be much higher. Of course, along the way we may get improved treatments but we don't know that.
Lockdown - like many others i don't expect much to change tomorrow. Its possible they may do something like allow people to visit garden centres in the same way that we can go to supermarkets at the moment. Its also possible that they may set out what will be unlocked if we keep the infection rate down over the next 3 weeks to keep our spirits up. Perhaps overthinking this but if we were to see the number of new cases decrease quite rapidly over the coming weeks then, rather than speeding up the release of the lockdown then there could almost be an argument to slow it down. If a few more weeks could lead to it almost being eradicated then that might be worth a go rather than go for the release of lockdown and then reimposition. I suspect that seeing what happens to other countries will play a big role though, they probably have lots of theories about what should work and they will be interested to see what actually does work.
Have there been any questions over the number of healthy under 40s who have died/been seriously ill? And following on from that whether there are any patterns to these people, eg occupation, BMI?
Originally Posted by: JHutch