The government’s numbers on Corona Virus just don’t add up

As I listened to our Prime Minister and the chief medical officer explaining their plan for tackling the coronavirus in the United Kingdom I wondered if they had gone mad or this was some kind of early April Fool joke. We want 60% of the population, about 40 million people, to get the Coronavirus. 32 million will have mild symptoms and 8 million more severe.

The first thought that came to mind is that we are told daily that at least 1% of those who get Coronavirus die. 1% of 40 million is 400,000 deaths just in the UK. The total for the whole world so far is only 140,000. But even 1% of 8 million more severe cases is 80,000 deaths, just in the UK. As the numbers of infected and deaths are dropping fast in China which has a population of over 1 billion people, 80,000 deaths in the UK makes no sense.

Although the numbers don’t make sense, the plan actually does. We have about 800 Coronavirus cases in the UK as I write. You can only infect people for the first 7 days you have it. Each infected person, on average, infects 2 more people. So as the government says in about 14 weeks, 60% of the country will be infected and the majority may never know they had it, with mild or no symptoms.

The new catch phrase is ‘herd immunity.’ The positive thing about people getting the coronavirus is that one week later they can’t infect anyone else, but they also have immunity. So once 1 million or 10 million people of the government’s 40 million people have had the virus, that’s millions with immunity. When you hit the peak number of daily infections, there are a lot fewer people a new case can infect. When they would have infected 2 people, say 1 is immune; then later many new cases don’t infect anyone because everyone they meet is immune. You can see how self isolating, or closing off communities, kills the virus in that area basically by most people being infected.

So the government’s plan looks good for beating the virus in possibly 6 months. Giving the country ‘herd immunity.’ This is done by at least 40 million people in the United Kingdom getting the Coronavirus. Those most at risk are the elderly, over 70, which should be a real concern here in Bexhill, and those with existing serious medical conditions.

The only question is how many deaths is the government expecting?