The UK govt has only three strategies with Covid. Herd immunity/live with it, lockdown for total elimination, or lockdown until a vaccine is found.
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But the last is just suicidal wishful thinking, not a serious strategy, as a vaccine may be years away, or may never happen, and probably won't make that much difference anyway.
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After all, we have a flu vaccine, and flu still kills as many people as Covid. Mutations mean that any vaccine is of limited effectgiveness.
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The second is also suicidal wishful thinking. It's very hard to wipe out an disease like Covid, because (1) it's fairly infectious;
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(2) as we are constantly reminded, there are so many people who get it who don't show symptoms, and (3) we're a country with very porous borders.
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It's extremely difficult to wipe out infectious diseases that have asymptomatic carriers. Bear in mind that even polio has not been completely eliminated after decades of trying.
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"the wild polio virus remains entrenched in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, its other holdout, where cases are surging. In Africa, meanwhile, the vaccine itself is spawning virulent strains."
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/surging-cases-have-dashed-all-hope-polio-might-be-eradicated-2019
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The only viable strategy that doesn't kill the patient is herd immunity/learn to live with it.
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If we're doing that we need to get on with it straight away, and stop destroying the country for a chimera.
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