OK reading this I can see that it looks as if I was linking the two which wasn't my intention.
There is plenty of evidence that at least some people who have been seriously ill aren't making quick recoveries - you wouldn't expect that from someone who has been on a ventilator for days or weeks, but there seems to be evidence that it's going beyond that.
I wasn't suggesting that it's likely that someone under 40 has permanent health issues from having Covid-19 - but I don't think we should be telling people that it can't possibly happen because there is too much uncertainty at present.
So what level of R do you pick to keep the hospitals OK? A fixed value of R doesn't give you a fixed number infections per day - it tells you whether infections go up or down, and when they go up they can go up very fast. So what's the plan - choose it at a rate that lets infections rise slowly enough, and then when they get too high you start locking down more? Or hope by then we have enough immunity? How do you tune it so carefully?
If we'd managed to get to R=1 at the start (infections constant, which looks like where we are now) we'd be locking in the high infection levels we had then, until and unless it starts to drop due to acquired immunity.
When people say the numbers in Sweden are declining, can I just check that we mean that the infected fraction of the population is dropping, not that deaths are dropping? Because the two would tell us rather different things.
I agree. What might have worked for us two weeks earlier could have been a distaster if done when we did lock down.
Yes - Sweden talks about travelling safely, as does England. But from what I have read (I think there is someone here who can correct me if I'm wrong), Sweden (again despite what some people seem to think) has changed their restrictions over time, and they went from telling people not to travel unless they must, to saying that trips by car (NOT public transport) for 1 or 2 hours was OK, to now as you say telling people they can travel but do it safely.
You want me to explain why how infection levels in London could be dropping if it's isn't due to acquired immunity? Well, so far as I know the current evidence is that it might be dropping, might be rising, might be staying the same, so what we see is consistent with continued social distancing keeping transmisson down.
If infection levels are dropping in Stockholm (not just deaths - I've explained why that's not a good indicator) then it might indeed suggest they have considerable immunity - but I don't think it's conclusive evidence.
It might indeed be a loss of nerve, but they have good justification for what I think in hindsight was not a terribly good policy, because the advice they were being given went from "Don't lock down- there's no exit strategy" to "If you do that the NHS will collapse - you must lock down even though we've no idea how we'll get out of it".
Yes I'd agree with that, except that I think it might also have worked for them but wouldn't for us because they had a lower level of infections when they started. If we'd gone for a Sweden-like approach in, say, early February, we would have been in a very different position. But without the benefit of hindsight I'm not sure they could have brought in such strict restrictions (essentially no international travel, and only essential domestic travel).
It may be how they get out of it but they have denied that herd immunity is the plan. They have said that the plan was to keep infections at a level that the health system can cope wth, in a way that is sustainable long term - if that results in herd immunity then that's good, but not the aim.
So this highly infectious virus is stopped from transmitting by people keeping 1m apart, most of the time when they can remember and there's room on the pavement or wherever....... And you really believe that ?
If social distancing is working to suppress the virus that can only be because the virus isn't anywhere near as infectious / easy to catch as we were told. Ironically that is perfectly possible because much of what the government has told us is rubbish, remember "this virus is indiscriminate" ?
UK Government : "This virus is indiscriminate"
NOTE : the death rates in the graph are actually wrong, they're lower than quoted, particularly now that doctors are getting better at treating the virus side effects. Even more importantly the graph does not take into account that not everyone is susceptible to Covid, examples of couples where one gets the virus and the other doesn't are common, plus the fact that only 17% of the passengers on the Diamond Princess actually caught the virus.
If some people are naturally immune, that has absolutely no impact on a graph showing your chances of dying if you become infected.
And yes - I do believe that this is highly infectious and transmission is reduced by the various measured we're taking. I think you have to be quite selective about what evidence you look at to think otherwise.
Because while you can show scary looking photos of large gatherings, they're not what the majority of the population is doing?
It's a good point about the elephant repellant, but I don't see how we'll end up with huge restrictions for years unnecessarily because nobody dares to stop.
The government continues to relax restrictions and I'm sure will continue to do so as long as infection rates don't start to rise (or maybe indeed if they do rise, if they reckon we'll cope over the winter and can convince themselves they'll go down again when the weather improved).
We also get to benefit from other countries taking different approaches (not just Sweden) and see how things go there.
There are countries being more cavalier than us - if we see infections dropping away in these countries with small loss of life, that's quite a big clue that we might want to take a different approach here.
