HEALTH CHIEFS PUT THEIR FAITH IN ‘HERD IMMUNITY’

HEALTH bosses hope Britain will develop mass ‘herd immunity’ against coronavirus in the coming weeks.

They believe it is now too late to contain the virus – and rather than ‘locking down’ the country in order to suppress it completely, they are instead aiming to delay the peak of the crisis.

This tactic, they admitted yesterday, will expose a significant proportion of the population to the virus. But in doing so, they hope to establish herd immunity so it eventually dies out.

This would involve 60 per cent of the country – about 40million people – getting the virus.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, said some of the measures intended to ‘delay’ the spread of the virus – such as asking people with mild symptoms to self-isolate – were ‘actually quite extreme’.

But he said taking more stringent measures – and protecting more people from the virus – would see a bigger epidemic if it came back.

‘If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time,’ he told the Radio 4 Today programme.

‘Our aim is to try to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it.’

But former health secretary Jeremy Hunt said it was worrying that more extreme measures were not in place ‘when we have just four weeks before we get to the stage that Italy is at’. He added: ‘You would have thought that every single thing we do in that four weeks would be designed to slow the spread of people catching the virus.’

Dr Nicola Rose, head of virology at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, said it was too early to say when herd immunity would develop, if at all.