Lockdown timeframe doesn’t make sense

[Candycane45]

Why is the UK gov talking about keeping the whole population in lockdown for 3 months or more all of a sudden? I thought their plan was for the 80 - 90% of us who will likely recover and not need hospitalisation to get the virus so that we develop immunity. And during this time I thought their plan was to shield the 10% who are highly vulnerable and would certainly need hospitalisation by asking them to self isolate. If the whole population is in lock down for 3 months as soon as they lift it the cases will surge, because not enough of the population will have been exposed to it. And by that time the very vulnerable will be so fed up of having been in isolation it won’t be so easy to ask them to do it again.

It mentioned 2-3 months then lifting the lid a bit up to maybe 6 months at the news conference today though nothing was certain.

That was the plan before imperial college published their modelling showing that that proposal would overwhelm the NHS causing many many more deaths. Now they're trying to limit the spread of deaths as far as possible so as not to exceed ICU capacity.

If we allow 80% of the country to get the illness over 3 months, that's about 56 million people.

About 1-200,000 of those will need respirators at any one time, during the peak. We have 8,000 respirators, so about 500,000 people would die over that 3 months.

The point of the lockdown is:

1. To keep the numbers low enough to allow the NHS to treat the critically ill.
2. To buy time to build more ventilators.
3. To buy time to study the disease and figure out if the mortality rate is correct, whether immunity persists etc.
4. To buy time to (hopefully) develop a vaccine or treatment.

Based on what we know so far, some form of restriction will be in place for much more than 3 months.

It sounded like we would be restricted for at least 6 months a bit like a simmering saucepan with the lid being lifted a bit

I have another question. Is the imperial college model based on the assumption that we started off with hardly anyone infected? Because it’s possible that this virus has been circulating for quite some time and given that most people will only get cold symptoms or no symptoms at all we could already have quite a significant proportion of the population infected and immune, but obviously not quite yet enough to achieve herd immunity. So then the college’s prediction would not be accurate. I do believe we should isolate and protect the vulnerable - but I really struggle with why the majority of the population needs to be isolated as well when they are very likely not to need hospitalisation or NHS resources. Also, if we did go down the route of focussing on protecting the vulnerable we could provide greater resources to ensuring that their quality of life is not severely impacted by the restrictions. We would also not risk economic collapse.

it’s possible that this virus has been circulating for quite some time and given that most people will only get cold symptoms or no symptoms at all we could already have quite a significant proportion of the population infected and immune

Other models have been done on that assumption (high transmission, low death rate), they can be made to fit the data. There are are a number of problems with that idea:

1. The values for transmission and death rate are broadly agreed on by multiple health organisations in different regions. There are outliers (e.g Germany) and they might all be wrong because we don't have loads of data, but it's looking less likely each week.

1. South Korea did loads of testing. In effect they tested everyone, whether they had symptoms or not, for quite a large population within the initial area. The death rate they came up with was 0.7%. South Korea has a very young population and good healthcare. That strongly suggests that the idea of a very high transmission and low death rate is unlikely.

1. Italy had most of it's early deaths in a couple of cities where a large chunk of the population got the illness. If the Imperial model was very wrong then this shouldn't be possible. The only suggestion to explain this is that they were caused by smog.