The UK may need to reconsider a “herd immunity” strategy to defeat coronavirus, a senior adviser to the Prime Minister has warned.
Professor Graham Medley of Imperial College London, the government’s chief pandemic modeller, says the country has “painted itself into a corner” as it battles the deadly bug with no clear exit plan.
He said the UK needed to face the trade-off between harming the young versus the old. Describing the stark choices facing the government, he says that long, indefinite periods of lockdown could cause more harm than the virus itself by leading to soaring unemployment, domestic violence, food poverty and mental illness.