The possibility of reinfection should have slammed the door shut on an already laughable concept. By the end of March, we were seeing hospitalization rates that were demonstrating that numbers well short of any possibility of herd immunity were creating crises - and there was uncertainty about the duration of acquired immunity. Once we actually knew that reinfection was possible, the discussion should have been simply over.
Simple point - at an epidemic scale, reinfections are still not that relevant of a factor that we know about.
Yep, we don’t know what particular factors might be influencing the number of cases. It’s a concern that some scientists have observed double the infection rate under lab conditions though, albeit only initial observations from a small sample size.
Italian officials also claim they have identified a case in a passenger who flew from the UK to Rome.
The two cases in Australia were detected in two passengers who landed in New South Wales after flying from the UK, said the state’s chief health officer Kerry Chant.
From what I can gather the ‘original’ virus was very clumsy at the infecting stage that under lab conditions a variant is much better is of no surprise, at least to me.
To contain it what we need to know is what vectors can prevent it from spreading. The worry I always had for the UK was the lack of efficacity of the ‘lockdowns’. The virus, in whatever variant, still has to come into contact with us to infect us. XMas was always going to be a bummer it really was just all about trying to reduce how much we got bummed by the virus.
Herd immunity is a term used to describe the benefit of vaccines. It simply does not exist in the wild and so was never a consideration for any serious scientist.
What the likes of Tegnell were advocating was not a true herd immunity strategy, but simple a brutal cost-benefit analysis. Those who ideologically agreed with his position on what to do but didnt have the stomach to stand by the brutality of it used the term as a means of sugar coating what they were doing. I dont doubt that many decisions makers convinced themselves it was real, but it was never a seriously considered possibility among scientists.
Thanks for clarifying. Is it called something else then if we (the general population) naturally build up/develop an immunity to something without the benefit of vaccines?
My recollection was the first proven case was in August - but my point was that with natural resistance as low as it is, reinfection wasn’t necessary to make the idea of herd immunity absurd.
Not just the high numbers of mortality but the high numbers of infection in China from December last year through to Feb/March showed that banking on heard imunity was heading down the path to the moafu’s.
When most countries in Asia where implimenting near to total lockdowns, the UK made no attempt to control people coming into the country leading to the virus spreading with no form of control.
Had BoJo used his brain and brought in compolsery quantine for anyone coming into the country using designated sites and having them properly checked and controlled like they did in Singapore, Aus, Indonesia ect. then they would have controlled the number of cases coming into the country early on and made the control later in the year a lot easier.
I still cant understand why that didn’t happen, unless you go down a very sinister route. Then the delay and utter joke of asking people to self isolate etc.
Do we know what the natural resistance is by proportion of those who have come into contact with the virus? Do we even know whether/why some people have a natural resistance to it? Were these known in March?
No. The phenomenon does not exist. There are other reasons why a virus might fall out of circulation but it has never been observed to be because of naturally acquired herd immunity.
After there has been a travel ban for UK citizens in Germany yesterday evening, all arriving UK citizens had to stay overnight at the airports and had to undergo a corona test.
There have been 7 positive tests in Hamburg and one in Hanover, some of the passengers have already had negative corona test papers to show. It is still unclear whether this is the new, possibly more contagious, variant of the virus.
Do you mean natural selection? In that the percentage of the population with naturally occurring immunity builds not because the rest of the population acquires it but because those who don’t have it are gradually removed from the gene pool?
In the wild it can build, but never has to the degree that it actually slows transmission.
When I virus that once caused us problems appears to subside it is either because it mutated itself out of being a problem, or we developed a vaccine or effective therapeutics to combat it.
