Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

“They” are always up to no good. Sure don’t “they” love imposing restrictions on the population for know good reason.

Liz how would you feel if half our population contracted Covid but a small percentage were hospitalised? Would that scare you?

You read my posts and just interpreted entirely different words. I can't really defend something I didn't write. So, I think I'll just gloss over responding to those points, as I didn't suggest keeping the place locked down. I suggested not providing a false sense of security by giving political promises with fixed dates.

As for your proposal to, and if I paraphrase Johnson, 'let it wash through the population', I would suggest you might want to ask the population's consent first. I don't think many of us would appreciate being used as a mass infection experiment to see what happens. I would even suspect if that were done deliberately here i.e. a deliberate policy programme aimed at causing mass infection with COVID, it could well end up in tribunals and court cases.

There's been scant evidence, beyond a few theories, that naturally acquired herd immunity is even possible with this thing.

We are aiming for vaccinated herd immunity and we're very much on track for that.

It's not a new one actually, it's been a concept for many, many years.

The concerning bit about this one is herd immunity either by vaccination or natural immunity may not be possible, certainly not in a matter of a 12-16 months of population exposure, due to the nature of the virus. We could be looking at quite a while with boosters and modified vaccines broadening and deepening immunity, and natural infections occurring in vaccinated people, before we achieve anything like herd immunity.

If the virus isn't stable, or if immunity isn't particularly good, it could be very much like our relationship with influenza. The only problem is that this one is much more infectious, which is creating a number of serious challenges that so far haven't been addressed.

Natural immunity through infection is absolutely not a silver bullet though and it's quite a high risk approach.

Flexibility and playing it by ear are essential at the moment it is impossible to accurately predict what's likely to happen, and a bunch of people on a forum theorising about idealised solutions isn't going to deliver them, nor will Tory or GOP political fantasies either.

We need to be opening, monitoring and opening some more and seeing how that goes and so on until we're out of this.

The vaccines should have made a huge difference, so fingers crossed the linkage between infections and hospitalisations is adequately broken by having some kind of large scale, vaccine induced immunity.