Boris Johnson’s U.K. Virus Strategy Needs People to Catch the Disease

(Bloomberg) -- Boris Johnson’s government hasn’t quite said it, but its plan for tackling coronavirus is clear: Slow the disease’s spread, but don’t stop it. Most people will get the disease, a lot of them will feel very ill, but almost all of them will recover.

The goal is “herd immunity” -- the point where a high enough proportion of the population has had an illness, and gained immunity to it, that it won’t be transmitted to those who haven’t had it. The aim is to achieve this over the summer months, before the next winter sets in.

“What you can’t do is suppress this thing completely, and what you shouldn’t do is suppress it completely,” Patrick Vallance, the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser, said on Monday. “All that happens then is it pops up again later in the year, when the NHS is at a more vulnerable stage in the winter, and you end up with another problem.”

David Halpern, head of the government’s Behavioral Insights Team and a member of the committee managing the U.K.’s outbreak response, said the plan is to build community immunity to a level that means those most at risk are protected.

“There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows as we think it probably will do, where you want to cocoon, you want to protect, those at risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease, and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population” Halpern told the BBC.

This explains why the timing of restrictions is so tricky -- and the challenge for Johnson, as he comes under pressure to step up the response, is so great.

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Hutton in London at rhutton1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Thomas Penny, Stuart Biggs

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