Herd immunity is not going to happen

I think people have a weird idea how fast herd immunity is meant to happen.

You get people vaccinated and reduce the R0 to below 1 and then wait a few weeks or months depending on the starting point.

The UK is fairly open and R0 with delta is between 0.8 and 1.1, as more get vaccinated and the remaining refusers catch it anyway, R0 will decrease and herd immunity will occur, after that it's looking at how long immunity lasts and monitoring breakouts.

But the idea that we would be there before enough people are vaccinated or using countries which didn't get the % vaccinated high enough (e.g. Israel stuck @ 60% for a few months) is laughable. It happens on it's own timescale, not ours.

There are a thousand stories from last year of one person getting covid and their wife/husband/children being perfectly fine/covid negative.

Will a politician make the decision to proceed without the masks and general rubbish or will it require a public vote to decide on how the country faces the future? If politicians wish to proceed in locking down the country to unlivable status they should additionally provide one way trips to Switzerland for assisted suicide.

Yup it's been well documented.

Israel's vaccination rate has flattened and we are ahead of them on the % of fully vaccinated. They've only increased their total by 10% since March, something we've done in the last three weeks and it's still rising.

Nonsense. People will just continue to get the virus and herd immunity will be reached that way eventually. The vaccines will however have prevented huge numbers of unnecessary deaths and avoid the health service collapsing under pressure. If it has to be herd immunity by infection, vaccination will allow for that in a controlled and stable manner so no, the concept is not out the window.

Cheers for the heads up!

Gibraltar not taking any chances achieving herd immunity from a 90-100% vaccination rate.

They've hit 100 and kept going.

(boards has taken a perfectly good image and made it unreadable, here's a link)

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Ultimately the immunocompromised will do what they have always done; take care. The closest I've been to that was a good friend whose boyfriend underwent treatment for leukaemia. The usual fare where they annihilate your bone marrow and replace it with the cancer-free stuff.

Her family home was closer to the hospital than his, so he moved in with her family while he was recovering, and they had to have very strict measures in place for themselves. No visitors were allowed to the home except for a few key people. Even of those key people it was made very clear that the slightest inkling of any illness and they had to stay away until they were better. Everyone living in the house limited their social contacts. My friend convinced work to transfer her to a desk job for a full 12 months where she'd have minimal contact with anyone.

And they had all sorts of contingency plans; where he would go if everyone else got sick. Where one family member would go if they got sick.

The reality is that immunocompromised people have been doing all of these things forever. And they will just continue doing it. The WHO are currently trialling treatments for covid, which should provide some relief/comfort for the immunocompromised. But ultimately the nature of the beast is that we can't perfectly protect them, we can only do our best.

One would hope - if someone is immunocompromised - that their primary and secondary social bubbles would all be fully vaccinated, which will massively limit the potential for a breakthrough infection to them.

The problem is people thinking of herd immunity as meaning the end of Covid, like with measles or smallpox. That was never likely.

However, we can get to a point where herd immunity reduces the risk and impact of Covid to a manageable level, and we're very close to that.

The definition of herd immunity is that enough people have immunity so that the risk to those without immunity is greatly reduced (NB - there is no such thing as zero risk). The problem (again) is that people are thinking about herd immunity as an all-or-nothing scenario and that is never going to be the case.

We can get enough herd immunity to resume normal life.

Anyone want to tell this guy he is wrong ?

He's not wrong, he just has a different take on the same set of facts.

He proposes that people in the UK will have a higher (but still very low) risk of serious illness, in order to send vaccines abroad to help vaccinate at-risk individuals in poorer countries.

I see his point, but if he was talking about Ireland, how many people would say "yes, let's continue with Covid restrictions so that we can help other people around the world".