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I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’
coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire

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   Let me take the arguments on their merits. The stated aim has been to
   achieve “herd immunity” in order to manage the outbreak and prevent a
   catastrophic “second wave” next winter – even if Matt Hancock has tried
   to put that particular genie back in the bottle this weekend. A large
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   disease: roughly speaking anyone up to the age of 40. So the reasoning
   goes that even though in a perfect world we’d not want anyone to take
   the risk of infection, generating immunity in younger people is a way
   of protecting the population as a whole.
   Play Video
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   video

   We talk about vaccines generating herd immunity, so why is this
   different? Because this is not a vaccine. This is an actual pandemic
   that will make a very large number of people sick, and some of them
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   The UK should not be trying to create herd immunity, that will take
   care of itself. Policy should be directed at slowing the outbreak to a
   (more) manageable rate. What this looks like is strong social