Yeah young people live with the elderly, they do and that’s why I said tough decisions and big calls are gonna have to be made by the powers that be. People are going to have to be rehoused, separated etc.
Correct me if I’m wrong but last I read less than 5% of people under 50 required basic hospitalisation, and id a guess a number of those would have had previous health issues. So I’d be amazed if they alone overwhelmed the system or caused it to collapse if they were allowed back into society, considering that at this point in this hypothetical scenario all the high risk people would remain in lockdown. There’ll obviously have to be more data to analyse and manage risk.
At this point in time the health system hasn’t been overwhelmed and that’s despite the fact this virus was open season for everyone up until a few weeks ago. That offers hope.
And yeah a gradual relaxation is what is best for the next few months but I dont think doing it over 18 months is realistic or until a vaccine. It would hinder far too many people.
Yes, probably true.
Also, true that 65.61% of the UK's population is under 50 years old (source 2011 census:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England). It probably has changed by 1 percentage point in either direction since then, so let's use it as a number.
Let's also use as a number to achieve her immunity the mentioned 60%. However, that assumes 60% of the entire population. So, for that to be achieved, then 92.17% of the under 50 population has to be infected. That is (to my best calculator usage skills) 40 million people.
Now, in an ideal scenario, you infect them over a period of time (until vaccine comes). That would be 18 months. So each month, 2.2 million people need to be infected. 5% of them require hospitalization, that means 110k people who require hospitalization. NHS has announced that it will increase the number of ICU beds to 40k (they still do not have near as many). In this scenario, the majority of those 70k who do not have a bed, die. Each month, for 18 months. More than a million deaths, terrible.
Now, to be fair, I kind of cheated. I did not use any variable for the number of asymptomatic people. They exist. There are reports that up to 80% of infected people might be asymptomatic. That lowers the hospitalization, and the fatality rate. In this exercise, that means that the ratio of hospitalization goes to 1% (instead of 5%). There are only 22k people that require hospitalization each month, NHS is perfectly able to cope with them. Some will die, but the death rate is small (let's put it from nowhere at 0.1%). That is only 2.2k people dying each month, only around 30k-35k in total. Tragic, but someone might say acceptable. Soldiers die in war, and this is the war.
Now, in this case, it would be possible to open and deal with this scenario. Unfortunately, I cheated again (the other way around). It is virtually impossible to have a uniform distribution. It will be a Gaussian-like distribution instead. Now, I won't even try to model the mean and the variance of it, too many unknowns. But we know that the pandemics last for around 8 weeks, we also know that the Spanish flu killed most of the people in a single month. So, let's assume that half of those people get infected within a month. That is 20m infected people, 200k of which require hospitalization. 40k get it, the other 160k die (the vast majority of them). The other half get infected before or after peak, so they bring the number of casualties from 30k-35k to 15k or so. In total, the UK loses around 200k people. Quite close to the study which puts it a bit higher at 250k. Still pretty bad, and IMO unacceptable. Even the government went away from it when it was clear that the number of deaths was so much higher than thought.
For comparison, Italy's medical system essentially went to the point of crashing with just a few tens of thousand infections (multiply it with 5 if we assume 4 asymptotic for every symptomatic), so only 200k infections. How is the US gonna cope with 100 more infected people at the same time (even if they are under 50)? Short answer, it won't.
The only way this her immunity nonsense might work if we find out that the number of asymptomatic people is way higher. Like 100 people without symptoms for everyone with symptoms or so. Like if we realize that this is less lethal than the common flu. And I think that pretty much is not the case, it just is not true.
Until then, try to minimize the damage to the economy after the mitigation stage. And well, there is at least one relatively large, relatively democratic, relatively rich and very successful country who is doing so. We do not need to find a blueprint for that stage, we just need to implement South Korea's blueprint in Western countries.