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Comment by monkeydust | Hacker News Reader

The UK stayed in a deep state of lockdown longer than most other European countries, that's why the relative numbers are bad. Question is, did it work, was it worth it? (saving lives)

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This was arguably because the UK fannied around and failed to implement its lockdown early enough, meaning that the resulting lockdown which was required anyway was more impactful than it would have been. Not just economically, but in terms of lives lost.

At the start, they planned to ignore it completely and aim for herd immunity.

Yep, the "conservative" government made a huge economic gamble, hoping it would pay off by not affecting the economy at all. It backfired, costing both jobs and lives.

Herd immunity might still be the only option on the table. The European countries which locked down early did indeed see fewer deaths during that first lockdown, which was the main benefit touted by the folks blaming the UK Government for not locking down sooner, but they're looking at rapid increases in cases again and there doesn't seem to be a plausible endgame.

Is there any evidence herd immunity is feasible at all?

China is not working on herd immunity, they are containing.

Is or was the WHO advocating herd immunity? I can't recall at least.

It isn't even clear if a long lasting immunity in individuals builds up -- first studies indicate the contrary. Without long-term individual immunity no herd immunity can be reached...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/06/19/imm...

The WHO is definitely not advocating herd immunity - most recently they've been calling for everyone to copy New Zealand's success in eliminating the virus right before New Zealand discovered they actually had community transmission. With that we're now pretty much all out of elimination success stories, so I'm not sure what they're going to do next.

Current evidence suggests "herd immunity" is the only feasible option. There seem to be precisely two kinds of places that can successfully lift internal restrictions without a resurgence: tiny islands like Guernsey with closed external borders that can eliminate the virus, and places like New York City, Italy, and possibly parts of Sweden where a substantial proportion of the population has been infected. That's it (and it's entirely plausible the former have just got lucky so far). Between the two is only an endless kind of purgatory countries like the UK and South Korea seem to have ended up in, where testing and tracing and restrictions short of lockdown keep case numbers down but fail to eliminate the disease and can't be lifted because that leads to exponentially growing infections.

Part of the problem is that the press has heavily obfuscated this. For example, they've tried to spin New York City as a success story and an example of flattening the curve working, when in reality it seems to be a perfect demonstration of what a non-flattened curve looks like - including the much sharper decline than that seen in places with lockdowns that did actually flatten the curve and fewer people infected. They've also mislead everyone into thinking that the decline in antibodies in people infected with Covid means they don't have immunity after a few months, when in reality that's not how long-term immunity works at all.

There will be way fewer deaths though. Treatment is much better than it was in March. A couple of million people across Europe that would have died without the first lockdown will live if they catch it now.

Also it seems that mild cases don't result in lasting immunity so lasting herd immunity via live infections is impossible.

> because the UK fannied around

Found the brit.

Yeah, the one major European country with even worse GDP decline than the UK is Spain, which also happened to have what was generally considered to be the strictest lockdown in Europe. Sweden, on the other hand, had a much smaller decrease in GDP despite their economy being heavily reliant on exporting to the rest of Europe.

> Spain, which also happened to have what was generally considered to be the strictest lockdown in Europe.

And also most flouted?

Yes, but we also didn't close down our economy nearly as much as most other European countries. I'm just saying that there are too many variables to conclude anything at this point, especially given that we won't have a good guess on "final" death toll until widespread immunity (from vaccine or otherwise).

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