Not sure if heard i heard it right, but England is more or less doing quarantine on the elderly and susceptible to serious effects of covid-19 & let be BAU for for the rest of the country since its effect is mild on healthy, younger population?
If true it kinda makes sense.. as someone posted, majority will then have a baseline immunity on the next corona, same lineage virus.
It will also lessen impact on the economy.. (& NRL ?)
Yes England is looking at the herd immunity strategy for this, it is why they are keeping their schools open!
I find this discussion extremely interesting and for me, it makes a certain kind of sense. Because the virus hits old people hardest, countries with ageing populations will be more severely affected. Based purely on demographics, the projected death rate in Italy is seven times the rate in a lot of other countries with much younger average age; Australia is slightly worse than the global average. Of course, the eventual death rates will also depend on countries’ health systems and containment responses.
I would think (and I believe it is being discussed in the halls of the DOH) this age-selective mortality of COVID-19 should be explicitly considered in plans to combat it. In Australia, 11% of the population are over 70 and are predicted to account for 63% of deaths. Insulating a relatively small proportion of elderly people will **halve deaths** and is potentially more practical than total lockdown of entire populations. In my opinion, we need to seriously look at the best way to achieve this. As mentioned, the UK is seriously discussing this strategy.
England is not just discussing it, they are implementing it. The issue is that you still need to slow the spread of the virus to prevent the health system from becoming overwhelmed, the greatest issue in Italy is that their health system has collapsed due to the pressure of too many cases at one time! If you watched Morrison's press conference on Sunday you could see he dropped in a few terms he has obviously picked up during his conversation with Boris. Things like Herd immunity and keeping schools open slows the spread have come straight from Boris.
Anyone over 70 should be self isolating now, I don't want a one in ten chance of dying from contracting this so anyone with elderly relatives get them squared away now.
I could write a book on herd immunity - it isn't the answer in this case even though it has been discussed internationally and locally, DOH is **not** going down that path. Besides the "logistics" of ensuring the requisite numbers of infections occur to infer herd immunity - the major issue is that there is absolutely no guarantee it would work - there have been a few reports of people becoming infected with coronavirus twice, but they haven’t been substantiated in peer-reviewed research, so can be discounted for now - so no-one really knows if an adequate immune response is created to offer immunity to second/third exposures. In addition, Herd Immunity is usually provided (and backed up by) by a vaccine (which we don't have) and the numbers are astronomical.
For example I know that In the case of measles, 95% of people need to be immune for infection to cease. For coronavirus, this figure probably is around 40%, based on a reproduction rate of 2.6. So, let's assume that they decide that Australia is to rely on herd immunity. If, conservatively, lets say that 10% of the population were infected (not the 40% you probably need for HI) – that’s 2.5 million Australians. Over a short period, those numbers would disastrously overwhelm the nations’ health systems.
The safest public health strategy is to prevent the onset of coronavirus at all costs. This would buy the health system time, “flattening the curve” as everyone is now saying so hospitals were not inundated with cases all at once.
Supposedly some people have contracted it again after they had recovered. Herd immunity may not even work as intended.
Follow the leaders...Singapore and Taiwan know what they're doing. We aren't even taking temperatures at the airports yet. Unbelievable.
As I said, real scientific/medical people don't work with "supposedly" - re-infection with SARS-CoV-2 (which is the actual virus) which causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has not been shown to occur or not occur. Anecdotal evidence from China and Japan indicate reinfection is highly probable. Non peer reviewed studies at the moment place this virus' ability to mutate mid way between the existing coronaviridae (common colds) and Influenza - so based on these early signs it is very likely immunity will not occur and any vaccine will probably end up as seasonal like the influenza virus.
The whole subject of immunity, viral mutation and the like is very complicated and nothing should be assumed at all until both proper scientific studies and review has been undertaken.
So as above, the safest public health strategy is to prevent the onset of coronavirus at all costs. This would buy the health system time, “flattening the curve” as everyone is now saying so hospitals were not inundated with cases all at once.
I think we agree
