Really interesting article in the Telegraph today by Professor David Livermore on why its pointless to try to shut our borders to variants and it ends on this point:
^^"There is one final point to make, stemming from the fact that immunity, like muscles, improves with work, not idleness.
As vulnerable groups are vaccinated – and second shots should be accelerated – lockdown should be swiftly released, allowing circulation of virus in the low-risk population.
Those who have been vaccinated will thereby be exposed at a time when their antibody levels are high and best able to fend off weakly-covered variants. The result will be to boost and widen immunity.
The touted alternative of a very cautious re-opening, sounds safer, but it isn’t. It hazards delivering a population with waning immunity as we enter the next winter virus season."
I find this really interesting. I keep thinking we sort of wasted the summer last year - my kids sat at home from May to September with no schooling where it seems very reasonable now to see Covid as a seasonal virus. Whatever Sweden did or didn't do right, the key thing is that they kept their measures constant and cases fell over the summer. Almost everywhere in Europe, cases were low in summer and picked up in winter - I refuse to believe this is down to Government policies all over the continent.
When people say just wait a few more weeks or months and ease out of this slowly, all I can think is every week we waste takes us closer to next autumn again. We wait until after Easter for schools to return then they'll get one term and be back into the September coughs and colds again!
It's interesting the point about immunity needing to work out. I read something that compared how we are dealing with Covid to peanut allergies. Many years ago it was believed the best thing to do with babies who might be susceptible to peanut allergies was to keep them away from peanuts altogether. However, they later found that this hugely increased the chances of them developing peanut allergies. Children who were given small amounts of peanut in their early years were significantly less likely to develop an allergy. Sometimes what seems like the common sense approach to protect from harm, can end up actually causing more harm. And I do wonder this for immune systems with locking ourselves away for months on end, especially for children.