Has the South got more herd immunity after the last wave?

[Marcellemouse]

Given that we're now seeing how common it is to be asymptomatic, could it be that many more people in the South had CV prior to the first wave than we realised? I believe their numbers of cases were higher back in March but maybe much higher.

I was thinking about what would have happened if we had lockdowned earlier than we did, say early March or as some people were suggesting in Feb.
I think we would be in a much worse situation now. We would have had fewer deaths but we would also collectively think we had cracked it, we’d have clapped ourselves all on the back and because we hadn’t had the shock of the rising deaths etc we’d have gone more back to normal and then we’d have been really hit the second time just when all the goodwill, resilience etc had ebbed. It would have been very hard psychologically and economically to do the full lockdown again. We also would not have been able to develop the knowledge about the virus we now have, the NHS clinical trials, what works best etc. With a later lockdown we have achieved some herd immunity ( not enough but some), learnt loads, identified drugs on mass trials, set up vaccine trials etc. We are now in a much much better position because of this, maybe a happy accident. Peru is a good example of a hard lockdown,doing really well, think they’ve cracked it and then open things up and virus comes back with avengence.
We can see now that the general public will only support one hard lockdown, so timing is crucial and I think we did( as a nation) get it about right.