How was Boris Johnson’s different strategy, based on “herd immunity” was received?

Almost immediately after being presented, the supposed plan came under heavy criticism, coupled with confusion that public-health and science advisers would recommend this strategy. Herd immunity is typically generated through vaccination, and while it could arise through widespread infection, “you don’t rely on the very deadly infectious agent to create an immune population,” says Akiko Iwasaki, a virologist at the Yale School of Medicine. And that seemed like the goal. In interviews, Vallance and others certainly made it sound like the government was deliberately aiming for 60 percent of the populace to fall ill. Keep calm and carry on … and get COVID-19.

Since Thursday, news of stricter impending measures, such as a possible ban on mass gatherings, has been drip-fed to the media piecemeal. For example, yesterday, ITV News reported that the government will soon tell people over 70 to isolate themselves for four months, either at home or in care facilities, “under a wartime-style mobilization effort.” But absent any details, critics were quick to point out flaws in the plan. “Who do you think works at those nursing homes? Highly trained gibbons?” asks Bill Hanage, a British infectious-disease epidemiologist based at Harvard University. “It’s the people who are in that exact age group you are expecting to be infectious.”

But making a decent long-term strategy is hard when there are still two big unknowns that substantially affect how the pandemic will progress. First, we don’t know how long immunity against the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, lasts. When people are infected with OC43 and HKU1—two other coronaviruses that regularly circulate among humans and cause common colds—they stay immune for less than a year. By contrast, immunity against the first SARS virus (from 2003) holds for much longer. No one knows whether SARS-CoV-2 will hew to either of these extremes, and according to one recent study, its behavior could mean anything from annual outbreaks to a decades-long quiet spell.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-herd-immunity-uk-boris-johnson/608065/