Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, says that the policy is to let 60% of the country get it. Here is my (no doubt flawed in many respects) understanding of that policy. If on average each person infects 2.5 others in a population with no immunity, 1/
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Replying to @wtgowers
"Letting" 60% of UK population of 63 mil get sick amounts to "letting" around 750000 die; 5 mil people will need hospital care. Assuming the crisis takes 5 months (it's shorter) and uniform load on hospitals (too optimisitc), that 's 1 mil patients/month. Seems unrealistic.
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Replying to @andrejbauer
There are measures that can reduce that number. One is to try to ensure that the most vulnerable are protected (which I think is going to happen), so that the death rate goes down. And another is to try to increase the length of the crisis. 1/
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Replying to @wtgowers @andrejbauer
But a back-of-envelope calculation I didn't do was to estimate roughly how long the crisis would have to last for everybody who needed hospital treatment to get it. I fear you are right that it is too long to be realistic, in which case there may be an extremely unpalatable 2/
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Replying to @wtgowers @andrejbauer
binary choice: either a huge number of people die, but then it's all over, or a much smaller number of people die, but it's far from over. People point to places like Hong Kong and Singapore as places where they have done things right, and it could be that they have, 3/
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Replying to @wtgowers @andrejbauer
but we won't know until we've seen whether they can return to normal life without the disease taking off again. If they can't, then they too will have very difficult choices to make. 4/
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Replying to @wtgowers @andrejbauer
My own view, which I didn't make clear enough in the thread, is that we should try to time the drastic measures so that hospitals are not overwhelmed, and because of the lag, I think that time will come pretty soon (and well before they are starting to fill up). 5/
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Replying to @wtgowers @andrejbauer
Almost certainly that would mean far fewer than 60% of the population got coronavirus though, so it would mean we were in it for the long haul, but future spreads might be easier to control if there's at least some immunity in the population. 6/
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Also, short of a vaccine, there's at least some grounds for hope that effective anti-virals may become available, altering the treatment options so as to relieve some of the pressure on the healthcare system (and to diminish the case fatality rate.) Getting sick later is better.
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