I respect Sunetra Gupta. The proposal that the vulnerable should be protected while younger people to whom COVID poses a very low risk get on with life normally and infect each other is not new and makes complete sense as an option that should continuously be evaluated - there has to be a point at which it becomes optimal to do that.
The question is will it work now and can it be done prudently such that health services are not overwhelmed, It won't organise itself if Johnson or Cummings wake up one morning and decide it's the way to go and the cork will not easily go back in the bottle id it doesn't. Just how will the vulnerable be protected when COVID is prevalent among all the others? Just going into winter makes it very risky IMO and we could well end up choosing whether to treat sick COVID victims or provide life saving treatment for all the backed up people critically ill with cardiovascular disease and cancer.
It would be an experiment, not a strategy at the moment.
On a positive view, the IFR might be on its way down, perhaps driven by the demographic of the people now catching COVID, improvements in case management, and, frankly, the prior removal of 50,000 people who were most susceptible by dint of where they were and their medical histories. In a couple of months there will be much better data on that.
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