Is the UK government waiting for ‘herd immunity’ or does it urgently need to inject immediate and significant additional resources into providing quality medical care interventions for its citizens?
Boris appears to wants us to believe that as long as you wash your hands and accept the fate of your loved ones as the price you must pay for developing ‘herd immunity’ to Covid-19 then some of us can look forward to greater immunity at some unspecified date! But when?
However what he has not told us is that there is no short term herd immunity short of being given adequate quality medical care to increase our chances of full recovery.
If instead we go down the vaccination route rather than immediate care, in order for the U.K. population to acquire such a strong immune response, it will take in the region of 90-95% of citizens to become vaccinated.
However, if the rate of transmission of infection is greater than one to one, say one to two or three other persons it will be much harder to create the optimal ratio to eliminate the few who remain unvaccinated.
That few outside of the already vaccinated population can continue to cause problems. The point at which the population moves to no outbreaks must have lower transmissions than vaccinations.
At present Covid-19 is expected to infect between 2 and 4 people on average. Until that drops we have can expect spikes in the infection rate.
These diagrams should illustrate what is meant by the ratio of transmission of the virus decreasing as the percentage of population vaccinated increases - 
However even despite promising recent breakthroughs in synthetically reproducing copies of the strain called Covid-19, triggering the earliest human trials next month (April), these trials will take many months to conclude to a point that an effective safe vaccine is available!
Therefore any conversation around promoting herd immunity is an admission that the government is prepared to accept large numbers of its citizens dieing from the virus meantime without any date by which optimal levels of vaccination amongst the population will be reached.
Meantime, until that point of majority immunity from the vaccine is reached, we are left vulnerable like self-isolating sitting ducks imo with no assurances of adequate care strategies that may save lives whilst creating natural immunity on full recovery from the virus itself.
@threadreaderapp please #unwrap
