13 Reasons Why Herd Immunity’s Nuts
UK govt seems still to be pursuing a Herd-Immunity-Through-Infection (HI) approach, despite its public denials.
UK’s “100,000 Deaths Is Ok” Covid Strategy:
UK’s almost matching Sweden’s approach:
Here’s 13 Reasons why seeking Herd-Immunity-Through-Infection to Corona, at this time, is, well, nuts:
1 We Don’t know If There Is Actual Immunity after contracting Covid
Immunity — How Long? THE $30t Question
2 We don’t know if or for how long it lasts
4 Saving Lives Is Cheaper
The False Economy of Herd Immunity
5 Can’t get to Herd Immunity without vaccines, yet we started going for Herd-Immunity-Through-Infection a year before vaccines went online….?!
6 Suppression works — Just ask New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Korea,…
7 We Don’t Know the Long-term health impacts of surviving infection
UK PM’s doctor calls Covid “this generation’s Polio”
Paying to keep Covid survivors healthy will cost vast amounts of money in future years.
8 Herd Immunity Comes Dropping Slow
Spain’s govt sampled the blood of 60k people:
5% have had the virus — FT: https://lnkd.in/dpSiyMt
To get to HI, w/out vaccine, 108,416 Spaniards need to die.
And 4,573,820 need to become infected.
Res ipsa loquitur
9 Deadliness of Covid’s Becoming Clearer Every Day
Covid’s global daily actual Case Fatality Rate (CFR) averaged 21% between 1 April & 10 May
First, it was assumed Covid was as deadly as seasonal flu – seasonal flu has a modelled fatality rate of
“well below 0.1%”
Actually, flu, killed 1,213 people in the UK in 2019:
Flu kills so few people that the WHO and the CDC use mathematical models not real empirical data to tell us how many die of it!
Is Covid just like SARS then?
Nope!
4 Reasons Why Covid Kills ⬆️ Than SARS?
So is investing all these lives for the chimera of Herd Immunity okay (especially when we can save them) okay?
Not really.
1% Infected Fatality Rate — Is chasing Herd-Immunity-Through-Infectiom okay?
No way.
21% Case Fatality Rate (as at June 2020 in the UK)?
Get outta town.
Herd Immunity’s nuts.
10 Financial advantage of chasing Herd-Immunity-Through-Infection Is Obsolete
Way back in February 2020, it seemed like a cheaper option to pursue Herd Immunity (for the amoral or self-described “realists” amongst us).
Now, the UK has pursued HI and it has had to shut down its economy anyway.
Double whammy: £100s billions in cost and virus isn’t even suppressed. Sweden by contrast only softly shut-down its economy:
11 Herd-Immunity-Through-Infection's anti-State intervention proponents’ arguments are inconsistent with their own refusal to let Covid affected companies die
Let the companies die and save the people:
12 It’s kind of nuts that one even has to argue about this
I do understand, people are suffering economic harm.
This clouds their judgement.
But these are the true causes and conditions of the harm, and no amount of chasing Herd-Immunity-Through-Infectiom will save us from the following impacts at this point:
a The Virus itself
b Slow/no response/‘Johnson spends February at Chevening sorting out private life-taking selfies’
c Unqualified (morally, skills’ wise) people left in charge during February 2020, who try to recover from doing nothing by labelling “doing nothing” as “mitigation” with the added “bonus” of “herd-immunity-through-infection”
d No-one thinking through during January: okay, PPE, respirators, re-agents, dialysis consumables, carehomes,…
e Chasing Herd-Immunity-Through-Infection instead of suppressing the virus is a unconscionable surrender-monkey approach. Just invest in test, track, trace and isolate: is it just TOO hard to do the right thing?
f No-one in western governments (apart from Oz and NZ) appeared to be reading the openly available data coming out of China during January 2020? So the best they can come up with to make up for this negligence is to tell US Chasing Herd-Immunity-Through-Infection’s a plausible public policy response?
Hong Kong — press releases available show the escalating epidemic from 31st Dec 2019 and a competent response:
g No “political” capital left with other nations after EU-Brexit farce so international cooperation and trust impossible and weakened herd of ministers after Brexit-related culls
h At each stage trying to do on-the-cheap what would’ve been cheaper had they started earlier
i Virus gets out of control
j Right-thinking people refuse to accept that 1–5% of population dying because during a-j governments didn’t get their proverbial s*** together is acceptable
k a–j necessitate lockdown = €trillions in costs/100,000 avoidably dead.
13 Habitable Countries Will Recover First!
Yeph, so (even before most of us had thought about giving variants the space to evolve) there were 13 reasons why seeking Herd-Immunity-Through-Infection was nuts!
Let’s test, track, isolate and suppress this virus instead.
All spare capacity in our economy should be reorientated towards this goal.
All.
We’ve done it in a time of war.
Why not in a time of Coronacrisis?
