COVID-19 ~ Herd Immunity

The hilarious thing was the UK Government claimed they were going by scientific advice. Pretty much any scientist will confirm it takes about 18-24 months to get herd immunity and it helps if you have a vaccine.

With Corronavirus its estimated Herd immunity should kick in at about 60-80% of the population. For the UK that means approx 36 million people need to get it and recover, unless a vaccine is produced. If you have a vaccine the time scale reduces. Getting to 60% without a vaccine could mean a lot of deaths.

Problem is we don't know how many people have had it already due to being lucky and only getting mild symptoms, the testing kits have also proved unreliable and cant be used.

1% of 36 mill = 360,000 deaths which is not a good figure.

The Ro (reproductive ratio) of COVID-19 is around 2.5 ie every infected person infects 2.5 others. If that can be reduced to 1.3 it becomes similar to Flu and herd immunity kicks in at around 25% of the population. With no vaccine on the horizon just yet, that's what needs to happen.

So how do we achieve that? It's simple STAY AT HOME as much as you can.

Staying at home reduces the infections, if the Ro is reduced to 1.3 we reduce the 60% level where herd immunity possibly starts to kick in to 25%.  (a 35% reduction in when herd immunity starts to work).

Simples :-D

How long that will take is another thing.


UPDATE 12/05/20

• Ro in the UK is now presently under 1, if true thats really good.
• It's possible that no effective vaccine will be available, certainly not in the near future, maybe never, we don't have one for SARS or HIV.
• SARS was eradicated without a vaccine.  Therefore in theory we don't need a vaccine to eradicate COVID-19 although it might be a bit more of a challenge due to the number of infections.
• COVID-19 is more infectious than SARS with the latter having a higher death rate.
• The 2nd wave of a pandemic is generally the worst.
• The Spanish flu pandemic had 3 waves and lasted 2 years and killed an estimated estimated 20 million to 50 million victims worldwide. Obviously there's big difference in medical knowledge.
• COVID-19 is totally different to previous pandemics, in that lots of people can have it, not know they have it and infect lots of people.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 resulted in more than 8000 cases and 800 deaths. SARS was eventually contained by means of syndromic surveillance, prompt isolation of patients, strict enforcement of quarantine of all contacts, and in some areas top-down enforcement of community quarantine. By interrupting all human-to-human transmission, SARS was effectively eradicated.

LINKS
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-about-herd-immunity
History of SARS, flu a guide to whether coronavirus will have a second wave
We don’t know how many people in the UK have Covid-19 and the symptom tracker app doesn’t tell us
Leaked Cabinet Office briefing on UK pandemic threat – the key points
Coronavirus: Mass testing earlier 'would have been beneficial'
Can we contain the COVID-19 outbreak with the same measures as for SARS?
How do SARS and MERS compare with COVID-19?
Influenza and COVID-19 - similarities and differences
Mythbuster: ‘Covid-19 is just like seasonal flu’
1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic