After clear criticism from scientific circles, the British government has adopted its crisis policy Corona virus changed suddenly. Unlike announced on Thursday, major events will be held in Great Britain now canceled. After the number of patients who died from the virus doubled to 21 on Saturday, the government tightened emergency measures earlier than planned.
In two weeks, all family members will have to stay at home in self-isolation if even one family member feels infected or sick with a cough and fever. Pensioners who are older than 70 should shortly stay at home for four months and avoid social contacts. Further measures to reduce social contacts in the population are to be taken shortly. Matt Hancock, the health minister, announced that the Thursday of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his scientific adviser Patrick Vallance’s praised strategy of “herd immunity” is not the government’s strategy.
More than 200 British scientists had one in one open letter warned that the course of the disease in Great Britain corresponded exactly to the course in Italy, Spain, France and Germany and that tens of thousands of infected patients could be expected within a few days. The policy of the British government to let the disease run free in order to later achieve so-called herd immunity of the entire population would completely overwhelm the British health system, the NHS. “Following the herd immunity strategy now doesn’t seem right because it only puts more pressure on the NHS so that only more people have to lose their lives,” the experts wrote. The editor of the scientific journal The Lancet warned that the government was making a “grave error”.
Accept high numbers of deaths?
What is the theory of herd immunity about? Assuming that a sick person infects about two other people with his virus when sneezing on average, the contagion factor is two. Any contagion factor greater than 1 leads to a massive spread of the disease. The contagion rate of the corona virus is a factor of 2.5 – quite high. According to the theory, the disease can only be overcome if a large part of the population gets the disease and is then immune, so that the infection does not fully develop. If a sick person sneezes, but at least 60 percent of the people in his environment are already immune, the contagion factor is reduced from 2.5 to 1, for example, and the viral disease subsides.
In Britain, however, this would mean that around 40 million people would first contract the virus and then recover in order to achieve immunity in the population. With a death rate of only 1 percent (which is actually higher), this would be 400,000 deaths. On Thursday the awakened Press conference by Johnson, Vallance and medical advisor Chris Whitty the impression that the UK government accepted this theory and might accept an extremely high death toll, fearing that the healthcare system would otherwise be overwhelmed by a second epidemic next year. The second wave of Spanish flu in the winter of 1918 was far more deadly than the first wave at the beginning of the year. The peak of the current epidemic is expected in the UK in May and June.
However, the British government’s approach has triggered great resistance, as there is currently no scientific evidence whether recovery from infection leads to longer-term immunity (probably not) and whether the infections subside in the summer months due to warmer weather (with new viruses) this is more rarely the case).
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