Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
There's lots of posts over the internet criticising Johnson for doing a U turn.
Is he simply moving onto the next stage of Herd Immunity, or is this indeed an admission that he got it wrong and he's changed course?
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That's a false dichotomy (in other words, there are more possible answers than the two you have offered).
The science of this has been explained on various news programmes throughout the day. Radio 4's World at One is a good place to start ... the first 15-20 minutes or so.
In essence, the strategy last week was to attempt a controlled burn through the population, in order to keep within NHS capacity but also to gain widespread immunity to SARS2 (the coronavirus causing coven-19). The progress of the infection generated a ton of new data over the weekend which was analysed at Imperial College London. This data suggested that under that strategy, critical/fatal infections could rise to 250,000 - far too high to sustain.
The strategy has now therefore changed to an increasingly aggressive containment effort. This does two things: first it sacrifices the drive for herd immunity, second it probably keeps the NHS within capacity. It also poses a serious risk: if the virus is still present in the population when restrictions ease, it will flare up again. We are probably therefore in this now for the very long haul.
The extreme long-term nature of the crisis we now face is the reason it was worth trying for herd immunity. I don't think it is fair to characterise this as 'Boris got it wrong' - there are always a range of options, weighted by available evidence. He would have 'got it wrong' by sticking to the same decision in the mount of changing weight of evidence. But he didn't.