The nonsense here is how herd immunity is estimated/measured.
There is no/little consensus on how this is defined and given how polarised this is it probably never will be.
The reality is that the UK adult population is heading to 90% vaccinated. If you want to measure immunity to death from the disease as immunity we're at about 90%.
Please don't ever pretend that's not enough. I cannot fathom a model even as bad as that used in report 9 where this doesn't lead to the virus effectively dying out in a population.
This will be one of the _many_ reasons with high cases in the UK we're not seeing bodies being piled high outside hospitals.
As for actually stopping the spread of the disease itself, this would have happened much sooner had people caught it and have a _full_ immune response which makes them less likely to transmit the virus.
The point of this is that govt. expected that the virus would spread during lockdown 1 (early 2020) because people wouldn't follow the rules (it spread more due to insanely bad policy and it getting into nursing homes and hospitals and hitting the at-risk).
The initial plan was to open-up once the 'first wave' dropped reached numbers the NHS could cope with and that there would be an open/close/open/close approach as numbers rose to keep the hospital cases at manageable levels.
After seeing the high compliance we kept the lockdown and aimed for a zero-covid policy which is where Australia and New Zealand are...
We didn't see the first wave really hit. We shut down too early and too hard in lockdown 1. This led to the amount of people building an immunity being very low.
During the relaxing in summer-2020 the places that returned to normal the most ended up with higher case numbers during summer and typically this led to a slower spread and lower peak hospitalisations during the winter of 2020-2021.
This is backed when comparing the high number of cases during the summer by region with England and the initial rate of cases in the same regions at the start of winter.
This diverges once winter properly set in as other factors became dominant. This is not rocket science
In the winter of 2020-2021 the UK locked down too late and more people at risk died.
This being too late was a combination of factors "it only kills over 80s" from Boris, the lockdown being too effective, the vaccine being around the corner and so on...
If you're going to make an argument that lockdowns shouldn't have happened based on herd immunity, arguing that herd immunity measures are nonsensical doesn't really help your case...
Yes, we are considerably closer to immunity from death from disease now that vaccinations are in place. That also doesn't make your argument we needed more people to catch the disease when it was relatively deadly any stronger.
It's not "rocket science" or any kind of science when you insist that your stats work except when they don't, and that lockdown timings both didn't let enough people get the disease and let too many people get the disease.
I'm not making a statement that the lockdowns should not all have happened.
That is what you're inferring from what I've said.
I'm just stating as to whether they had the intended effect or not. In both cases they did not have the exactly intended effect because people mis-handled the situation.
The first lockdown can be justified from numerous perspectives. Economically, Healthcare, Socially the first lockdown at least in the UK allowed for the government to get control back on a difficult situation which we ended up spending at least £1T and bringing in the army for so any reason why we failed to get control falls on deaf ears given how much clearly has/had to be spent on this.
The statement that more people needed to catch varient-OmegaEpsilon over variant-X to reach immunity is just daft and an argument for the sake of it.
I say rocket science because there are no higher-order derivations required to explain the behaviours in this case the modelling is much, much simpler and just requires understanding what's going on. (I've worked with both sets of simulation systems, the code for rocket science is often much better and more complex but viral modelling is typically done very, very, very badly still in 2021)
The big clue here is LOCKDOWN1 != LOCKDOWN2 there are different reasons why they may have happened, how successful they were or should/could have been and that they both failed in different ways.
Making a statement that LOCKDOWN1 == LOCKDOWN2 is making a statement that every day of the year is exactly like Chirstmas. If you're not following this then you've misunderstood what I'm saying and I would advise you re-read some epidemiological texts, some texts on numerical modelling and some texts on statistical analysis.
> I'm not making a statement that the lockdowns should not all have happened. That is what you're inferring from what I've said.
Feel free to insert the words when they did into my original statement. What I am actually inferring from your statements that you believe the first lockdown should not have happened [when it did] due to inability to build herd immunity is that you believe the first lockdown should not have happened when it did because it reduced the ability to build some theoretical degree of herd immunity. I simply noted it was extraordinary that having suggested building this herd immunity for the coming winter was sufficiently important to warrant allowing more days/weeks of exponential spread of a then poorly-understood virus, you followup by saying herd immunity isn't a very well defined concept anyway!
(use any definition of herd immunity you like: when we're we're recording more new infections than this time last year, this ain't it!)
> The statement that more people needed to catch varient-OmegaEpsilon over variant-X to reach immunity is just daft and an argument for the sake of it.
Luckily, I didn't make that statement. I'm not sure quite how you missed the link between vaccinations and COVID being less deadly now (especially having made it yourself in the comment I replied to!) but for the avoidance of doubt I am arguing that the disease is less dangerous now, because the majority of people are vaccinated. But it is also still spreading despite it being 18 months later, many people having had the disease in the intervening time, and nearly all adults having received a vaccination which ceteris paribus greatly reduces their likelihood of transmitting the disease to others [as well as the harm it can do]. Which suggests allowing it to spread earlier last year would have been pretty futile as far as limiting COVID's ability to continue spreading in future months, but would obviously have killed some of the people who are fine catching it now.
Ultimately the extraordinary claim that Lockdown 1 was too early because we did not allow enough people to catch the disease to build up immunity but Lockdown 2 was too late (even though delaying it allowed more people to build up full immunity!) needs more justification than pointing out the lockdowns were not identical. Especially when you've already conceded the initially slower infection rate you observed in areas which had spikes earlier in the year doesn't persist as "other factors" come to dominate (i.e. there wasn't enough natural immunity on a population level to prevent mass infections). And probably still isn't, although the big advantage of being infected this winter rather than last winter or last summer is that you're a lot less likely to die.
Ultimately if you want to convince people your analysis vs the government's epidemiologists' is Galileo vs the geocentrics, you'll have to find a more persuasive evidence for your theory than telling people you've built models and they should read textbooks...
The nonsense here is how herd immunity is estimated/measured. There is no/little consensus on how this is defined and given how polarised this is it probably never will be.
The reality is that the UK adult population is heading to 90% vaccinated. If you want to measure immunity to death from the disease as immunity we're at about 90%.
Please don't ever pretend that's not enough. I cannot fathom a model even as bad as that used in report 9 where this doesn't lead to the virus effectively dying out in a population. This will be one of the _many_ reasons with high cases in the UK we're not seeing bodies being piled high outside hospitals.
As for actually stopping the spread of the disease itself, this would have happened much sooner had people caught it and have a _full_ immune response which makes them less likely to transmit the virus.
The point of this is that govt. expected that the virus would spread during lockdown 1 (early 2020) because people wouldn't follow the rules (it spread more due to insanely bad policy and it getting into nursing homes and hospitals and hitting the at-risk).
The initial plan was to open-up once the 'first wave' dropped reached numbers the NHS could cope with and that there would be an open/close/open/close approach as numbers rose to keep the hospital cases at manageable levels. After seeing the high compliance we kept the lockdown and aimed for a zero-covid policy which is where Australia and New Zealand are... We didn't see the first wave really hit. We shut down too early and too hard in lockdown 1. This led to the amount of people building an immunity being very low.
During the relaxing in summer-2020 the places that returned to normal the most ended up with higher case numbers during summer and typically this led to a slower spread and lower peak hospitalisations during the winter of 2020-2021. This is backed when comparing the high number of cases during the summer by region with England and the initial rate of cases in the same regions at the start of winter. This diverges once winter properly set in as other factors became dominant. This is not rocket science
In the winter of 2020-2021 the UK locked down too late and more people at risk died. This being too late was a combination of factors "it only kills over 80s" from Boris, the lockdown being too effective, the vaccine being around the corner and so on...