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> It's not "nonsense". It's real. It works for almost every other virus out there (e

You're failing to take in consideration that the virus incubation period is on average 1 to 2 weeks, and those who manage to recover from the disease take about 2 weeks from diagnosis to confirmed cure.

This means that you're comparing 4 weeks of exponential growth with 2 weeks of constant recovery.

Sure, those who survived the disease will be immune afterwards. That's great for herd imunity. But the thing you fail to understand is that as the disease increases exponentially, when that time arrives the whole nation has already become infected, and it's too late by then because health services will be unable to cope with the demand and a lot of people will die due to lack of basic medical care.

> But the thing you fail to understand

No no, I understand that. But the thinking is, and it seems to be backed by data, that the health system will be able to cope with a full-population maximal pandemic, as long as it is limited to the much less vulnerable segments of the population. The ICUs in Italy and Hubei were filled, for the most part, with elderly patients. The math, such as it is, checks out.

The risk management analysis, again, is IMHO batshit crazy. But the theory seems about as sound as it could be given the data we have.

> No no, I understand that. But the thinking is, and it seems to be backed by data, that the health system will be able to cope with a full-population maximal pandemic, as long as it is limited to the much less vulnerable segments of the population.

It really doesn't seem that you're getting it, because the whole point of this exercise is that it's quite patently obvious that no health care service in the world is able to keep 10 to 15% of their population in intensive care, which so far is the expected incidence of cases that require medical care.

If that was the case then no one would be bothered with yet another flu-like viral infection.

What is the age distribution of the ICU requirement? Is it really in the ballpark of 10% for all age groups?

> the expected incidence of cases that require medical care.

Among the general population!

Among people under 50, the best data we have is that the fraction needing ICU care is something like 0.2% (I think, I'd have to look it up again).

The intent is to quarantine the at-risk and let it propagate in the "safe". I genuinely think it's you who's failed to understand the plan. You're arguing against something that is not the stated UK policy.

Thanks for being devil's advocate.

I too think it's too risky, FWIW. I read a while ago there might be permanent damage as well, but maybe that was hocus.

Edit: Business Insider reported HK doctors found some people have 20-30% reduced lung capacity after recovery: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-recovery-damage-... (n=12)

Do we actually have evidence that this quarantining is possible or working?

> Among people under 50, the best data we have is that the fraction needing ICU care is something like 0.2%

Any chance you remember where you found this statistic? I have been looking for any details on hospitalization rates by age range, but haven't had luck so far.

> 10 to 15% of their population in intensive care

Estimates are closer to 10% of the infected getting severe cases, and some small-ish fraction of those requiring intensive care. (The higher percentage numbers are usually an artifact of low testing rates of infected people.)

Also, epidemiology suggests that 20-70% will get it. So, we’re looking at ~1% of the population in the hospital at once.

The rest of your points stand; we don’t have nearly enough hospital capacity for 1% of the population.

Note that with a two week active phase, the pandemic would have to drag on for 20 weeks to get that number to 0.1%. I doubt there is capacity for that either.

The plan also relies on flattening the curve like other countries' plans. They're just calculating that people won't stay in lockdown for months, and that if they put one in place now people will start emerging just in time to hit the peak of the infections.

Recovery is exponential too - it just lags behind the new cases.

There are 200 Viruses, vaccines only exist for 20 or so. For some you can hardly build immunity (e.g. Dengue fever).

"Sure, those who survived the disease will be immune afterwards." There have been reports of re-infections in China and Japan. This may be mistakes - the never were cured - but this could also point to something more severe. Proceed with caution.

3. the immunity gained through an infection holds for a long enough time (how long would need to be checked with the infection rate), which we do not know yet

Additionally, we know nothing of the long term effects even for the "young and healthy". Mortality rates for people 10-39 is 0.2%, 40-49 it's at 0.4%, 50-59 1.3%, 60-69 at 3.6%. Serious conditions develop in a bigger proportion of cases, so you are looking at 4-10% of under 60 population in ICU with unknown long term effects.

Translation: good luck!

> unknown long term effects

Ultimately, it’s a just a really inconsistent cold. The vast majority of cases are mild. However, if it spreads to the lungs, it’s worse than the flu.

As far as I know, there’s no evidence that it’s any more exotic than that.

There are reports from China of significant lung scarring among patients who had to be hospitalised.

This is the concerning thing for me, as an asthmatic if I stop taking meds I'm already 30% down on lung capacity, adding another 20% on top of that is scary. That 20% can't be mitigated by meds either.

Yes, the idea that only those 70+ are "at risk" is weird. But they probably can't afford to isolate everyone 50+ - both from an economic and herd immunity viewpoint - so they will risk losing 3.6% of people aged 60-69 and 1.3% of people aged 50-59.

According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/281174/uk-population-by-...

8.96 million aged 50-59, 7.07 million aged 60-69.

This ignores the risk of spreading the virus to other populations.

And if the worst case occurs, with millions of elderly and immunocompromised dying, there are billions in potential savings in pensions and old-age healthcare, as well as improvements in housing affordability and overall reductions in national CO2 emissions.

Herd immunity works because:

1. Vaccines, immunitized people don't get sick in the process of imunization, don't need hospitalization, don't die

2. Slow and gradual imunization over multiple years.

Neither of this is uphold all other cases of herd imunization in history I'm aware of always had a massive price in human lives.

Also it only works if the virus doesn't mutate to much, party of the reason the flu is still around even through you would believe we got herd imunization in last many decades since the flu is a think.

> 1. The virus is genuinely of low danger to the young and healthy

Except it's not really that low it's only compared to old people low.

And it's close to practically impossible to only affect young people without having idk concentration camps for young people with strict separation from the older people (like over 20?,30?) for a duration of over a month and still 2 in 1000 or so dying. AND it's anyway to late for that measurements as it's already to widely spread in the UK eitherway.

That is... not a good description of herd immunity at all. It has nothing to do with vaccinations or time scales. Wikipedia's is quite clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

The idea is that once a significant fraction of the population has some immunity to an infection, the ability of an infected person to spread the virus (a term called "R0" in the jargon) is fundamentally impeded by its ability to find infectable targets. So the R0 drops, and so does the exponent to the growth. Once that exponent goes below 1, the number of cases drops over time instead of growing, and new infection clusters can't start.

This works. It's why we don't have things like measles outbreaks (or didn't, until the anti-vax crowd messed things up) and why newly mutated flu strains can't find purchase and become pandemics.

Newly mutated flu strains don't become pandemics because they aren't severe enough for people to care, they certainly proliferate.

You seems to think that people who is against the idea either doesn't understand what herd immunity is, or doesn't understand the plan. We understand both, we just think that the risk analysis is wrong.

Specifically with the GP, his argument is that herd immunity gaining through large percentage of the population being infected in a short amount of time is a bad idea. Normally we got herd immunity via vaccination of the population, since it is much safer than being infected. That's why vaccination was mentioned.