BigWave said:
Just have to isolate and test/quarantine until a cure or prevention is found.
This should be well before herd immunity is reached ever reached.
PS: There's no hard and fast start to herd immunity.
If the rate of infection RO is around 2.5 (each infected person will pass it to 2.5 others before they recover), then when 60% of the population have recovered, there is only 40% who haven't had it.
Then, RO drops to 2.5*0.4 =1, so the number of active cases is level.
With RO<1, the number of active cases drops away.
With social separation and testing/quarantining, if RO drops by half, say to 1.25, then when only 20% of the population have been infected, RO =1.
If you define herd immunity as the point where RO=1, you can see that the % of population varies dramatically depending on social separation and the efficiency of detection and quarantine.
Even if Australia reaches 25k cases, that is only .1% of the population having been infectected - a long/long way from herd immunity!
I think what concerns me is how the Ebola pandemic worked out in west Africa in 2014. Ebola was less infectious R2.0 but more deadly yet it took three years to get control of it. Three years is a long time for any economy. It was suggested the actual economic aftermath caused more deaths than the virus it's self. That is my concern and believable.
To this day there is still no cure for Ebola so I'm not convinced this will be any different to Covid 19 but I'm no expert. In three years of lock down we will be back in the stone age. At the moment we are concerned about overloading the health system. Twelve months of lock down we may not have a health system. Italy is still being flogged
There are also reports some who had had the virus and tested negative are now testing positive again.
In a nutshell I agree, lets try and control it by lock down but smashing the economy when no end is in sight could be disastrous in the long term. Italy's figures are hardly encouraging.
I know the UK has starting to give up testing. It may also explain China's miraculous figures