If we could go back do you wish we went down the herd immunity route?

[Sakalibre]

Just curious

YABU - no
YANBU - yes

After knowing someone who died aged only 48 from covid in april and four others who also got ill I would say no.

I think herd immunity is a great idea if you've already got your second gated second home to run away to.

*I think herd immunity is a great idea if you've already got your second gated home to run away to.

"There's a chap called Ivor Cummins on you tube"

He is also on Twitter, where he comes across as a very unpleasant individual with some very unpleasant followers. He also cherry picks 🍒 more than a farm worker on a cherry farm. He has a clear agenda and only selects the evidence which backs that agenda. But I guess it gets him lots of YouTube views, so ad revenue money machine goes brrrrrrrrrr!

Personally, I would rather listen to a variety of actual epidemiologists, virologists, public health experts, academics, doctors etc...

I don't understand why many people on this thread are extremely suspicious that catching and recovering from covid gives you either lasting or even temporary immunity, while being extremely optimistic about a vaccine doing the exact same thing!

The two kinds of herd immunity are two sides of the same coin. A vaccine simulates the results of surviving an infection, without having it. So if people who have had covid and recovered without any lasting effects aren't immune, a vaccine isn't going to work effectively, in the way that other vaccines do, and we'll all just have to take our chances. As Anthony Fauci is fond of saying, natural infection is the mother of all vaccines.

The quickest way to get to herd immunity would have been to take no mitigation measures at all. It would have been 'achieved' (obviously at the cost of a large number of deaths) by early summer. I don't for a moment wish we'd done that. But there has to be a balance. At this point I think it is reasonable to accept a fair rate of infections among non-vulnerable younger people to allow them to resume their education and lives, and to build immunity in that section of the population (which will eventually benefit everyone). This does mean that older people will have to continue to be even more cautious than they might have been if we existed in a near-permanent state of full lockdown. But I think that's OK. At a societal level it's 'worth' a vulnerable person in their 80s not being able to go out to a restaurant for lunch so that a child of 8 can receive some education in 2020. That person almost certainly won't be around when the 8 year old starts earning, but it isn't good for any of us in or past middle age to trash the futures and learning and earning potential of children and young people, even if we don't have them ourselves. For those of us who have children, this seems like a no brainer. My year one child isn't going to take himself to school voluntarily; as parents we surely need to advocate for the right choices for our children? (Just as we would advocate for them to eat well, even if it was more convenient for some other group in society for them only to have junk food.)

Vaccines can be repeated @worldwideover

He certainly is not in favour of lockdowns and feels Sweden got it right - I don't see these opinions as unpleasant.

All his videos can be fact checked, all the info is out there. The presentations are long, presented calmly and as I say all checkable.

I'm also a fan of Carl Heneghan from the centre for evidence based medicine.

Yes, vaccines can be repeated -- just as we're finding that people have covid twice. My point was a bit different. A disease that doesn't confer strong, long-lasting natural immunity to those who are lucky enough to survive it is unlikely to be suppressed by herd immunity either in the 'let them get covid' Cummings way, or through vaccination. People are bad enough about getting children's boosters done. A vaccine that had to be repeated every few months to be effective is a vaccine that too many people will skip, be unable to get, etc.

I don't know yet how long-lasting or powerful covid immunity is, if it exists at all. I know I have antibodies, so I guess I'll find out...

But I do feel pretty confident that the second infection, if it comes, will be manageable. I know what the symptoms are and how they present in me, so I think I'm more likely to know when I'm infected again, even before the results come back. I wasn't especially ill, so won't feel as panicked by the idea I have a really serious disease. I've worked out the whole quarantine situation in our house, what works, what doesn't. So we'll do it all over again...

If I don't get covid again this winter, despite working in a job that gives me a higher than average chance, I don't think I'll be queuing up to get the vaccine, but I'll be more confident that it will work.

I don’t know anyone who skips vaccines or boosters.....

Hell no. I have long covid and if we had locked down a week earlier I wouldn't have spent 24+ weeks feeling like shite.

@Vintagevixen exactly on the own goal.

I can already see the A-level exam of 2050, or so, where the question 'did national lockdowns in the wake of the 2019 coronavirus [there will undoubtedly be some more new ones by then] save lives' becomes a bit like 'should Britain have guaranteed Belgian neutrality in 1914'? A canard. Everyone will revise the answers on both sides and agree that it was a very hard moral decision. Books like the Freakonomics of the future will explain to us how everything could have been so much better if only one little thing had happened differently. Or maybe that one thing will be bigger and, in light of the current argument, apparently crazy, eg, in the absence of a vaccine governments paying young people to be infected in a controlled way.--

My own view is that the UK lockdown will probably turn out to cost more lives than it saved. I still think it was the only ethical decision to have made. But that was with the idea of it being fairly short. I don't think the current withdrawal or lack of provision of many basic NHS services is an acceptable trade-off for keeping covid transmission low, especially when other parts of society are open. If my child can go to school, she should be able to see a GP, etc. Or another example, a friend's antidepressant meds have been discontinued. She has now been off it for a month and seems increasingly irritable and unpredictable. Things like this play out slowly. Hopefully the medication will be restocked soon. If not, hopefully she'll get to see her NHS psychiatrist. But maybe not. There are lots of these little ticking time bombs that have been created over the last few months and which the NHS doesn't seem to have a plan for dealing with. It's a long period of closed or suspended healthcare services that will start to kill non-covid patients in serious numbers.

The two kinds of herd immunity are two sides of the same coin. A vaccine simulates the results of surviving an infection, without having it. So if people who have had covid and recovered without any lasting effects aren't immune, a vaccine isn't going to work effectively, in the way that other vaccines do

I think people feel you can have a second vaccine without a great deal of effort so it's not a great loss if a vaccine delivers temporary immunity. It's not a strategy that kills anyone and you can include everyone in the programme. If, however, you allow lots of people to catch covid, a fair number will die. Then, if the immunity is temporary, another wave of people will die. Then, another. So even if you thought it was worth having the first lot of deaths, it wouldn't have achieved anything significant or avoided future deaths. And it's likely that but everyone would get sick so there would always be more hosts available than if a vaccine programme was running.

not everyone

think herd immunity is a great idea if you've already got your second gated second home to run away to.

That's the problem, really. I think a lot of people speaking against covid restrictions are doing so from a privileged position, not in a tenement, yet they're using the suffering of people in tenements to strengthen their position.

Also, how did herd immunity to bubonic plague go? Or to Typhoid. Or TB. Or AIDS. Or syphilis. Or herpes. Or the flu.

We have herd immunity for things like measles where enough people have been vaccinated. You don't get herd immunity without vaccination.

Didn’t Spanish flu die out because of Herd immunity

Some people who'd been exposed to it in 1918/9 carried their immunity to the (1951?) epidemic - my grandfather was one. A lot of other people got sick and many died.

@Shockingstocking yes, I agree that that's what people think. In fact, however, compliance with a vaccine that has to be repeated frequently is likely to be unsatisfactory. There will be all kinds of reasons why people (especially, but not only, in younger and less vulnerable groups) will skip the second or third one, fail to be offered it, find their appointment js delayed etc, and end up catching covid anyway. And that's without anti-vaxxers. So many people are not at much personal risk from covid (more than half the population is under 41) that the incentive to keep going back for the vaccine will just not be there at an individual level.

The thing I disagree about is the idea that lockdown is a no-risk strategy. I already know two people who have died because of lockdown, one elderly (because chemo was withdrawn), one middle-aged (suicide after business folded, a year after a divorce, lonely, history of bipolar disorder and unable to get NHS help in time).

I didn't suggest lockdown was a no risk strategy. Perhaps you're thinking of someone else. Relative to the numbers dying from covid and those who would die if our NHS was overwhelmed, it was lower risk.

I disagree with you partially about uptake of Covid-19 vaccine. People were under estimated re lockdown and it's likely that universities etc would be pretty uncompromising. I don't think it would be particularly easy not to have the vaccine and access everything people like to access including places of employment, public venues and service industries. So it would be an ongoing pain but overall I think the pressure will be over powering to get it.

Worldwideover - I agree about the risks of lockdown.

I read the other day that the estimate for preventable cancer deaths in the coming years caused by lockdown delays is at least 50.000.

I know several people who have had various really important tests and treatments delayed. Keeping my fingers crossed for them.

Looking back I think a short sharp lockdown at the beginning for a month to get a handle on infections. A lockdown where pubs did actually close everywhere, only essential shops were open and people did SD and if you went to get food or out of the house you wore a mask everywhere and people did stay at home.
Then with the nicer weather we should have started back up again with masks and SD measures.

I would have left the major lock down until the bad weather had set in.

But I don’t think anyone could have envisaged what the world has had to go through and it is ok to say what we should have done. We just didn’t know.

@Shockingstocking. Sorry, I think you were talking about the literal fact that having a vaccine wouldn't kill people, and I took it slightly differently. I DO think that the focus on a vaccine and the willingness to keep many areas of the NHS closed until it arrives will kill people. The original three-week lockdown was very obviously the right thing to do, no question. But, like very many of us, I am uneasy about keeping major parts of the health service closed for 6 months +.

Was reading one of the summaries on Nature.com yesterday and this troubled me. If children don't get infected at their usual rate with one of the other coronaviruses, will they start to be more at risk from covid-19 than they have been so far? At the moment, every sign of a temperature or cough in a school age child is a disaster, and leads to them quickly being withdrawn. But maybe we should be aiming for 229e parties?

'Most children infected with the new coronavirus show few signs of illness, if any. But a few children are struck by a severe form of COVID-19 that can cause multiple organ failure and even death. Now, scientists have begun to tease out the biology of this rare and devastating condition, called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C.

Doctors have diagnosed hundreds of cases of MIS-C, which shares some similarities with the childhood illness Kawasaki’s disease. To understand MIS-C’s biological profile, Petter Brodin at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and his colleagues looked at 13 children with MIS-C, 28 children with Kawasaki’s disease and 41with mild COVID-19 (C. R. Consiglio et al. Cell doi.org/d8fh; 2020). The researchers found that compared with children with Kawasaki’s disease, those with MIS-C have lower levels of an immune chemical called IL-17A, which has been implicated in inflammation and autoimmune disorders.

Unlike all the other children studied, children with MIS-C had no antibodies to two coronaviruses that cause the common cold. This deficit might be implicated in the origins of their condition, the authors say.'

Ohh interesting, so they are basically saying kids need small doses of colds etc to continually prime up their immune system? And those affected by inflammatory reaction due to Covid had low levels of exposure to other coronaviruses?

Fits with the hygiene hypothesis re. allergies on the rise and the whole science of acquired immunity I guess. Lots of scientific knowledge to come out of this, will be interesting.

No. How could that ever be ok? Just let it rip through the population killing the elderly and vulnerable or BAME. We need to protect the lives of our vulnerable.
Once you are dead that is it. Education, finances can all be recovered but you can't come back from the dead.

Education, finances can all be recovered but you can't come back from the dead

How are we to recover financially if Dp because of his age will never work again.

I am a little younger and my business has had to be out on hold indefinitely and will probably never recover.

So far this disease has cost us all our savings, and probably another 6 figure sum
There is only so much more we can take before we are wiped out.

Dd has lost her business and Ds has lost so much of his income he is now on UC

DP thinks he might as well be dead as he can’t see any reason to prolong the inevitable.
The NHS seem incapable of taking a blood test (6th attempt) and delivering the results to him so who knows if his cancer has progressed.

I would love to know how Dp and I do come back from this.

I don’t think New Zealand have got the right idea
This could never be over. Will people from NZ be ok with never seeing any overseas family again. Never travelling again.

How long before someone gets sick of the restrictions

Pandemics in the past have always become manageable, why do you think this is any different? In the meantime life is pretty much business as usual in NZ (even though there are some reintroduced restrictions, which hopefully will ease again soon) - apart from the travel - very different from life in the UK at present.