A lot of you seemed to find this funny. It's definitely not funny. Let me try to spell it out for you in terms you might understand...+
Until a few days ago, the UK govt's policy appeared to be a form of "mitigation". That is to say, it sought to slow the spread of coronavirus whilst yet allowing enough of the population to become infected, gradually, that eventually we would achieve herd immunity.+
In a best-case-scenario, in which mitigation allowed everyone who needed it to receive medical care, that strategy was expected to kill btwn 250,000 & 400,000 people. I emphasize: that was the best-case scenario. I would have expected the figure to be much higher.+
I was prepared to support the govt in that mitigation strategy. There are no good options here & there was no strong reason to believe any other strategy wld mean fewer deaths in the next couple of years, anyway.+
+Many other people condemned that mitigation strategy. They called the govt murderers. Instead, they said, we should suppress the spread of CV with a radical lockdown. This alternative strategy is called "suppression".+
+Many of those that advocate suppression talk as if it were a matter of a few weeks. "Cases have already fallen close to nil in East Asia", they say. "We should have done the same here from the start." They seem to think suppression is just a temporary inconvenience.+
Now, let me be clear. If the UK govt says we shld suppress, then I shall support suppressing for now, just as I supported mitigating when mitigating was the policy. But suppressing is not a solution. It merely buys time for us to think of a solution.+
Suppression has not yet been enacted in the UK. At present we are mitigating a bit, suppressing a bit. With the closure of schools we are suppressing more. Within a couple of weeks we will probably implement true suppression, as they have done in Italy and France.+
Once we are in to suppression, there is no clear way to escape. It doesn't matter whether the number of cases in the UK falls to zero. CV is everywhere in Iran. It will be everywhere in Africa & South America. It will enter community circulation.+
Whilst any CV cases survived anywhere on earth, as soon as we tried to end suppression, CV cases would explode again within a few weeks.+
Could we, perhaps, just stay under suppression long-term? That would imply huge changes to our society. I sketched a few here. () But another one I thought some on twitter might appreciate is this: no new person to have sex with for yrs, unless pre-vetted.+
Why? Well, true suppression means the govt outlaws all unnecessary social contact. Your date with that handsome chap you met online is pretty much the definition of unnecessary social contact. And if you can convince the govt it's necessary, that's one phase of vetting.+
Unvetted social contact also imposes potential considerable burdens on your family - that the whole family catches a disease giving about a 1 in 5 chance that they will become so ill they require hospitalisation to live & get (potentially for the long-term) compromised lungs.+
So that 16 or 18 or 20 year old that lives at home with you. If he or she is going to go off on dates - & especially if he or she is going to have sex with anyone - the govt & the family will have to pre-approve it. That is what "suppression" means. And that could last for years.
If you think that's funny, you haven't understood. That is the kind of scenario the Imperial College paper envisages for our society, not for a few weeks, but for at least 18 months & with no guarantee that at the end of those 18 months there's a way out.+
Now, maybe we'll be lucky. Maybe in the time Suppression buys us, someone will develop a cure for CV or a vaccine, some other form of resistance-delivering inoculation or some kind of symptom-reducing treatment that cuts the risk we end up in the 20% of near-fatal cases.+
My guess, fwiw (which is v little, since I know nothing about virus cure/prevention research) is that the official advice is correct & we shld assume we're talking at least 18 mths with no guarantees that is the end.+
If that is where we go, the only way out will, in the end, be to allow people gradually to get it or (perhaps more likely) to deliberately give it to people in batches - eg one city at a time. We could try that after enormously increasing our ICU capacity - like, 10- or 20-fold.+
The result would be deaths in the hundreds of thousands - exactly as so widely condemned a few days ago. But at least it would not be in the millions (as I fear mitigation might lead to without a huge rise in medical capacity 1st).+
So, enjoy your idle, stuck-at-home, no-dates-without-govt-approval few years. And remember: this is what *you* insisted upon.
