Herd immunity is not going to happen

There is another problem to achieve herd immunity. Unlike measles smallpox , Covid also infects animals. So we would to vaccinate all animals as well andget them wearing marks also.

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.

Not sure. It would make sense to wait a bit before going ahead with a booster - then make sure a single booster addresses multiple variants of concern. And then it will have to be done quickly. Else another dominant strain will quickly evolve in partially vaccinated population. These partially vaccinated populations (or immunocompromised ones with HIV) seem to be generating tougher variants. Think SA and UK.

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!