I saw that optimistic thread about the government's special British strategy last night. I'm only a molecular biologist, not an epidemiologist. But if that is the strategy, I don't see how that works in real life.
The overall idea is to manage the "flow" of patients from the vulnerable population requiring treatment by tuning the rate of infection, whilst ensuring in the background a steady stream of young healthy firebreaks get infected and then immune without requiring medical attention (hence the idea of keeping schools open as long as possible).
Firstly, young healthy firebreaks, e.g. children, don't exist in isolation from the vulnerable population. They encounter teachers and other staff in schools, and they come home to their parents.
Secondly, the experience of other countries suggests that a lot of the vulnerable population, once they become ill, spend many weeks in hospital. So you'd need to "tune" your infection rate with a many weeks lead time. And we hardly have slack in the healthcare system to treat the population, as it stands - even with the NHS gearing up as best it can, and with the non-existent measures that will supposedly "flatten the peak" you'd have to gamble on really tightly controlling that flow of patients.
Thirdly, people are people not mathematical models. Fuck knows what they're going to do when the penny drops and they see people getting sick and dying in large numbers.
Finally, this tweet:
7.The risk is being able to accurately manage infection flow relative to health case resources. Data on infection rates needs to be accurate, the measures they introduce need to work and at the time they want them to and to the degree they want, or the system is overwhelmed.
As our esteemed leader said, and was immediately echoed enthusiastically by supporters all over these threads with most fervent belief, we're going to stop general testing and only test people in hospital, and discourage anybody from even directly contacting the authorities at all whilst they exhibit only mild illness. Because "it's a waaaaaaaste of resources so whyyyyyyy do we need know anything about infection rates"
In other words, we are explicitly saying that we don't want accurate data on infection rates in the population.