As Europe shuts down, Britain gambles on ‘herd immunity’
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain once said his political hero was the mayor in the film “Jaws,” praising him for defying mass hysteria to keep the beaches open after a constituent is eaten by a shark.
As the coronavirus now stampedes across Britain and much of the world, Mr. Johnson is heeding the same principle, spurning the mass closures that have become commonplace across Europe and gambling his political future on a more restrained approach.
While countries across Europe have shut schools, sporting events and even restaurants and bars, Mr. Johnson has largely kept Britain open, opting for more targeted measures like asking people with respiratory symptoms to stay home. In effect, his government has said that mass closures will not halt the outbreak, and that exposing a large segment of the population will help build immunity and limit future infections.
That strategy has startled some epidemiologists, drawn criticism from a former health secretary and political ally, and prompted angry demands that Mr. Johnson’s government reveal more of its reasoning.
Cases of the coronavirus in Britain, held low for weeks as officials tracked down the contacts of known patients, have now surged, rising to nearly 800 on Friday from fewer than 600 a day before. With testing limited to hospital patients, Mr. Johnson said on Thursday that the true number of people infected may be as many as 10,000.
President Trump, citing the rising case count, said Friday that he was considering adding Britain to the list of European countries whose citizens are banned from flying to the United States.
“There’s no other country in the world managing the epidemic in the same way,” Francois Balloux, an infectious disease epidemiologist at University College London, said of Britain’s approach. But, he said, “It’s not an insane decision. And it might actually pay off.”
The government is leaning heavily on skepticism in some scientific circles about the effectiveness of mass closures. Some epidemiologists fear that closing schools only pulls front-line doctors and nurses away from their work, and believe that large events are less dangerous for spreading the virus than more intimate gatherings at bars or at people’s homes.
It has also said that the measures it has taken, like asking people with persistent coughs and high temperatures to stay home for a week, will reduce the spread of the virus considerably.
But British advisers are also leaning on a more contentious theory: that exposing a large proportion of the population to the coronavirus could help people develop immunity, and put Britain in a better position to defend itself against the virus roaring back next winter.
Sir Patrick Vallance, England’s chief scientific adviser, said the government was looking “to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.”
Herd immunity, a term usually used to refer to the way mass vaccinations can stop the spread of disease and protect people who are not immune, is not seen by many scientists as a tool to be used against the coronavirus. Mr. Vallance has said that it would require roughly 60 percent of Britons to become infected, creating enough immunity in the population that a second surge in cases next winter would be less severe.
But experts said that was an unusual and untested approach, and that it would be impossible to keep older and more vulnerable people from becoming infected too, putting them at a significant risk. They cautioned that the science was unsettled on how quickly people develop immunity to the coronavirus, and for how long. And experts urged the government to show more of the evidence behind its thinking. [Continue reading…]
Hundreds of scientists have written to the government urging immediate “more restrictive measures” be brought in to enforce social distancing, following the action plan it announced on Thursday.
The 245 UK people supporting the open letter include scientists from a wide range of departments, while it is also backed by 29 international signatories.
The letter says: “In particular, we are deeply preoccupied by the timeline of the proposed plan, which aims at delaying social distancing measures even further. The current data about the number of infections in the UK is in line with the growth curves already observed in other countries, including Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. The same data suggests that the number of infected will be in the order of dozens of thousands within a few days.
“Under unconstrained growth, this outbreak will affect millions of people in the next few weeks. This will most probably put the NHS at serious risk of not being able to cope with the flow of patients needing intensive care, as the number of ICU beds in the UK is not larger than that available in other neighbouring countries with a similar population.”
The letter continues: “Going for ‘herd immunity’ at this point does not seem a viable option, as this will put the NHS at an even stronger level of stress, risking many more lives than necessary. [Continue reading…]