Britannic Herd Immunity and Coronavirus

This general view jars with the European response to the outbreak of COVID-19. Owen Matthews, writing in Foreign Policy, noted that:

While continental Europeans were closing schools and putting soldiers on the streets to enforce strict quarantine rules, the British government's official advice to its citizens was, essentially, just to keep calm and carry on.

The Johnson method of governance requires constant cross-checking. Signals are mixed, contradictory and chaotic. Health Secretary Matt Hancock did his little bit of mixed signalling by suggesting UK health policy towards COVID-19 was not quite as Sir Patrick had intended it writing in The Sunday Telegraph:

Herd immunity is not part of it, This is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy. Our goal is to protect life from this virus, our strategy is to protect the most vulnerable and the protect the NHS through contain, delay, research and mitigate.

Hancock's hurriedly revised position was assisted, in no small part, by a modelling analysis from immunologists based at the Imperial College of London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, though it was unclear whether he had ever embraced, at least directly, the herd immunity idea. (There is no mention of the term in the coronavirus action plan.) The researchers, in the 9^th report from the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases and Modelling, took a particular interest in comparing potential impacts of COVID-19 to the devastating flu outbreak of 1918.

Two strategies were considered by the research team: suppression, which would involve the reduction of case numbers to low levels or their total elimination; and mitigation, which would not interrupt transmission totally but:

(would) reduce the health impact of an epidemic, akin to the strategy adopted by some US cities in 1918, and by the world more generally in the 1957, 1968, and 2009 influenza pandemics.

In what is an absorbing, if unnerving study, policy makers would have latched onto the conclusion:

that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over.

The predictions were also rightly sobering. Britain would suffer some 510,000 deaths, and the US 2.2 million were the epidemic to be unmitigated. Using mitigation strategies would see a rough halving: 250,000 deaths in Britain; 1.1-1.2 million in the US.

In the words of the report:

We therefore conclude that suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time.