An international group of scientists have signed an open letter supported by more than 60,000 members of the general public calling for lockdowns to be ended in favour of a herd immunity.
The group’s appeal for a new approach is called the Great Barrington Declaration, named after the US town where the declaration was made. It says that those who are not vulnerable “should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”, as maintaining current lockdown policies will cause unrepairable damage.
“Their proposed strategy is outside the scientific mainstream,” said James Naismith, a professor of structural biology at the University of Oxford. “Infection rates in the UK reveal that as new cases rise in one age group, they spill over into older groups, and from there drive up numbers of people in hospital and, ultimately, deaths. It seems fairly obvious that no government could effectively seal off every single vulnerable person in a given population while letting the virus romp through the rest of them.”
There is also growing evidence of the longer-term damage COVID can cause. Valeria Calugari, a 23-year-old retail worker, tested positive last August and overcame the virus but still suffers does not feel well, either physically or emotionally. “At one point I thought: Am I alive or dead?”, she told me as she remembered lying in bed with a burning fever, and no appetite.
So while coronavirus is less unlikely to cause death in younger people, it can lead to serious land lasting complications, which is something that those who have flocked to sign The Great Barrington Declaration appear not to have taken seriously enough.