Pence says European travel ban will extend to U.K. and Ireland

The rest seems like babble. No, closing schools for two weeks will not make the problem go away - but it will buy time, to try and set up revised working and living arrangements for everyone.

So what is the point of doing almost nothing?

I'm not seeing any other country looking at the UK and saying "Oh, I wish we'd thought of that."

Their reasoning is that if the only things you can do are China-style lockdown or nothing, then the disease will just resume exponentially growing the second lockdown ends, so it's pointless to do it at all.

While that may be technically right (under some optimistic, unverified assumptions, e.g. no reinfection), I think it's a false dichotomy. Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea aren't under lockdown, they're stopping the spread by just having good testing and case tracking capacity, and good hygiene. And the longer things go on, the better they're getting at doing that. If things are getting out of hand, a temporary lockdown is effective (as it was in China), to get the numbers down while building up this kind of capacity. But the UK seems to have just dismissed this option out of hand... which means they seem to be heading blindly to disaster.

They want to avoid a lock-down disrupting normal life. Meaning general restriction of any and all individual movement all together.

The trouble is that life as we know it got cancelled in the past few weeks. And the harder society tries to cling to the idea of "business as usual", the worst things are going to get down the line.

> Will they just let the old and weak die as part of their plan?

In a nutshell: Yes.

The idea of "herd immunity" is that if enough people are immune, the virus can't jump from host to host and people can't infect each other.

Vaccination is essentially an artificial way of creating herd immunity without making people actually suffer the illness. Of course, we can't vaccinate, so the other scenario is people actually contracting the disease and getting sick.

The stark consequences of the U.K. strategy are (a) an exponential increase in sick people who need healthcare (b) the implosion of an overran healthcare system and (c) many more people dying. Not just the old and weak, but literally anyone who requires healthcare (i.e. heart attacks, strokes, other illnesses, accidents,...).

Countries such as Italy and Spain enforce a lock-down exactly BECAUSE they want to avoid healthcare systems from collapsing any further.

Confining people at home literally slows the spread infections as there are far less opportunities to pass the virus from host to host. Decreasing the rate at which more people get sick buys time for the healthcare system to process those who are already sick.

Down the road, people will still contract the disease, but less people will die including the weak and the old as resources will stay available to tend to those who really need them.

Remember, when we talk about "old" and "weak" people, we are talking about someone else's family members and loved ones. If you want to show solidarity and at least do some kind of civic service towards your (local) community, then do this:

* Work from home if you can / are allowed to. * Don't make unnecessary social calls. * Wash your hands regularly. * Don't touch your face. * Don't visit people at risk if you don't have to. * Keep a fair distance from other people (6 feet). * If you feel sick, or you're coughing: stay the f- at home. * Don't hoard and don't buy from the black market. * Keep calm and carry on. Society isn't helped if you're going to act like The End is Nigh.

As far as I can see, the following are the fundamental assumptions of this strategy.

1. Much of your population will get infected at some point. This is unavoidable.

2. Heavy quarantine measures as employed in various other countries are not sustainable or effective over the necessary timescales. The quarantine will need to be lifted after a few weeks to avoid all kinds of other negative effects (including those adversely affecting health in other ways) and then the exponential spread will resume anyway.

3. Certain parts of your population are at much greater risk than others, due to age or other complicating conditions. These are the people you most need to protect. Most other people will be able to look after themselves at home with some unpleasantness and inconvenience but relatively little risk of more serious or permanent consequences.

4. Someone who has previously been infected and survived will have a degree of immunity thereafter.

5. There are limited intensive care resources available in the NHS to care for patients in more serious conditions.

6. As time passes, several things improve likely outcomes:

6a. We move past the winter season, which both reduces stress on the NHS generally and also somewhat reduces the effects of the coronavirus.

6b. The NHS is increasing its number of intensive care facilities above normal levels.

6c. Eventually, antiviral medications and vaccines become available, but widespread availability is likely to be at least a year away.

So the plan is to allow a degree of natural infection within the general population spread out over time, with the aim of keeping the number of more serious cases at any given time within the capacity of the NHS to treat as well as it can.

As this happens, we buy some time for the situation as a whole to improve, and there is also likely to be some degree of herd immunity building among the general population. In the meantime, the priority is to minimise exposure for those most at-risk and to ensure as much as possible that anyone who does get infected with more serious consequences can at least be treated as well as possible.

In probably a few weeks, when the level of general exposure and the number of more serious cases have risen and we're in danger of reaching capacity limits in the healthcare system, then we start to deploy the stronger quarantine measures and the like, for the same reasons as everyone else but in the hope that they serve the purposes above in particular.

People who understand the science much better than I do seem to be saying that this actually is quite a reasonable strategy and really could work better than what other nations are doing as long as those assumptions are broadly correct, but also that it does have some specific risks, such as the fact that we aren't 100% sure so far that surviving an infection really does confer some degree of immunity, and the possibility of deferring the peak until it hits the more dangerous winter season at the end of this year.

Denial is not an effective response, nor is attempting to quarantine 60 million people indefinitely, or closing schools for indefinite periods (puts more pressure on hospitals as staff need to take time off or find childcare, kids not even confirmed as a vector here).

There are certainly different possible ways to delay and different timings for implementing different measures, it will be interesting to see which is most effective in the end. Let’s just hope that hospitals in most countries can cope with the strain.

Everyone keeps saying there are many more people infected than is known. If true, is there really any other option than accepting many will become infected until herd immunity kicks in?

I'm also not sure quarantines can really work with this virus. The fact the large majority of cases are mild, makes the virus incredibly easy to spread. It remains to be seen if China can keep the virus at bay while they remove the quarantine.

Now, I've heard older people optimistically say, "COVID-19 isn't such a big deal, it's just like measles coming back, like when I was a kid". But to me, this is a sad signal of societal decline. We can't go to the moon anymore, we can't build big infrastructure anymore, and now apparently we can't even hold on to the public health gains we made 40 years ago.