Getting back on track.
The football stadiums etc. are closed because we all get together, and can catch the virus, so keep apart to beat the virus.
Herd immunity says that to beat the virus, we have to "herd" together.
Conflicting statements.
I imagine you're thinking of a herd of, say, cattle for this analogy.
The idea of herd immunity's action is that once a sufficient majority of a given population has been seroconverted by a particular virus (and have successfully recovered), those left who are still unaffected and potentially vulnerable are at a much lower average risk of contracting said virus. This is because you cannot infectiously spread a pathogen through an immune population, so it becomes increasingly difficult for it to, by chance, find a route to a potential infectee.
This relies on the particular virus not mutating quickly in ways which encourage reinfections.
. Admittedly, this is a fairly safe general assumption.
I imagine this is the scheme our government is trying to induce as quickly as is practically acceptable... Simply put:
- Trying to find the balance between only enough people becoming critically ill as you can deal with, but not stopping is spread such that it takes forever to work its way through the population.
At the moment, we're not reaching capacity yet. So the government hadn't determined to decline spread by discouraging public groups; the football clubs and authorities themselves are the ones who've decided to cease - for instance the National League decided they would let games continue this weekend. The government hadn't suggested it yet. They're probably keen to increase the spread to the point of capacity and try to manage the situation from there... it's a very risky (and politically dangerous) route to take, but if managed right it could be the quickest route out without "really bad" outcomes (morally, of course I have reservations
***).
One of the interesting political decisions is about school closures. It
could be that, now we're very certain the young are no worser affected than would be usual for a mild virus, to use them as a means of infectious spread to help reach a 'balanced' infection rate vs critical case rate geographically, after which would then close schools and by this time, many people will be working/staying at home. This plan would sound absolutely horrific to the average man, however, and should be something that's never admitted to.
*** It's worth saying, even a potential best case scenario isn't the nicest thing to read... Let's say a simple 60% infection of the total population would be adequate for a successful herd immunity situation (
who knows what it may ultimately be), and a lower-than-seen-anywhere 0.6% mortality rate (just a bit under the best-testing South Korea) for the infection:
60% of UK Population: 39.6 Million infected
0.6% Mortality: 237,600 dead
Average UK annual flu deaths: ~17,000
They're just
loose speculation of course, involving wild assumptions about infectiousness, seasonality and uniqueness, but hopefully it doesn't take much thought to see that only small tweaks and failures are required to make it potentially much, much worse. For now, I suppose everyone will keep their eye on Italy as the most 'progressed' case area.