I've been trying to avoid posting on the Covid forum, but I couldn't really let this one go unchallenged.
But if you can't eliminate it (which we surely can't) then ultimately, there isn't really any viable alternative but to accept people are going to get it.
This is true.
The issue here is that those who persue a 'we must prevent anyone getting it just in case' agenda are extremely keen to overstate any potential effects of the disease into furthering their impossible agenda.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of why we are in lockdown, held by people on both sides of the lockdown debate.
There are two possible ways out of the current crisis if we want to avoid a significant number of deaths:
- Herd immunity, via a vaccine
- An effective treatment, to increase the capacity of our healthcare system.
Until we have either of those, we have to keep cases below the capacity of our healthcare system or we will see another large wave of deaths. This is because a large number of people (much larger than the number of people who otherwise die from covid) need major interventions at hospital in order to recover from the disease. If we exceed the ability of our healthcare system to do this, more people die. This is what happened in Wuhan, Italy and New York until they got their outbreaks under control, and is what is happening in Brazil and other parts of Latin America.
In reality, keeping the number of cases within the capacity of our healthcare system actually means keeping them as close to zero as practically possible.
This is because:
- The virus spreads incredibly fast. Cases grow exponentially, and the rate of exponential increase (R number) is not small.
- Currently, our only way of reducing cases once they get close to system capacity is to impose extremely damaging restrictions on people's social and economic activities.
- The damaging restrictions we use to reduce the number of cases take much longer to reduce the number of cases than it takes for them to increase in the first place.
Keeping case numbers as low as possible at all times means you can impose the damaging restrictions on people's movements for as short a period of time as possible and on the most local level you are able to, rather than needing a severe and widespread intervention like we had in the UK from March to July.
Coincidentally, this is current government policy in most countries around the world.
It also has handy side effects like reducing the number of covid deaths, and freeing up hospital capacity to treat other things like e.g. cancer.
If you are a healthy young person, the need for a government policy that keeps cases within healthcare capacity (which, as discussed above, is the effectively the same as keeping cases very near zero) is possibly the only reason you need to be worried about coronavirus cases spreading, and it may feel unfair.
But until we have a treatment or a vaccine this is the reality of the situation we are in. It is unlikely to change before the end of Winter 2020/21 so we should get used to it.
They tend to downplay the severity of 'flu, which of course is mild for most people but does kill thousands of people and can also have long lasting effects too, because they know that we have no alternative but to live alongside the 'flu virus and therefore are keen to exaggerate the effects of Covid-19 because they don't want us to end up living alongside the virus that causes Covid-19.
If coronavirus were only as bad as flu, we would not have been in lockdown, because our healthcare system is able to cope with the levels of flu we see in our population most years. This is not what we saw in our hospitals in April.
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