The country is waiting for clear guidance on what happens next
SIR – The Government has failed to make a timely announcement about the extension of the present restrictions, which expire very soon.
Consequently there are hundreds of events still scheduled to happen in the next few weeks. These include the Guineas horse race meeting at Newmarket on May 2-3, and the resumption of cruises, with several departures scheduled in the last week of April. VE commemorations, due to take place on May 8, are currently on hold. Please can we have some definitive guidance? David Wise
London SE9
SIR – I am 72, but my biggest worry is not the possibility of catching Covid-19; it is the impact that the current lockdown is likely to have on the economic futures of my children (working-age) and possibly my grandchildren (school-age).
Covid-19 appears to affect younger age groups less seriously (though I know there are, and always will be, tragic exceptions). Would it not make sense to maintain restrictions for those over 65 and with underlying health issues, and put in place systems to ensure they do not come into contact with younger people – then get those younger people back into work? This should be accompanied by a robust testing, tracing and isolating regime to take younger people infected with the virus out of circulation.
Such an approach would seem to offer a better chance of preserving the country’s economic future. The Government must set out a strategy for returning life to a semblance of normality. Rory Laird
Dollar, Clackmannanshire
SIR – Professor Sam Shuster’s exit strategy (Letters, April 6) is a nice idea, but the numbers don’t stack up.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 82 per cent of the population lies in the age range 0 to 64 years. If these people remained unshielded, as Professor Shuster suggests, the effective case fatality rate given infection would be 0.3 per cent.
Certainly, due to the lower ages of that group, that is less than the commonly quoted overall rate of 1 per cent covering all ages. However, with an estimated reproduction number of 2.5 and a sub-population of 54 million unshielded persons, one might expect 90 per cent of them to be infected within 100 days, leading to a death toll of around 140,000.
Things become worse once one factors in the difficulty of effectively shielding, under an unmitigated spread of the virus, the remaining very vulnerable 18 per cent of the population. The NHS would be utterly overwhelmed in the process, causing more deaths among those unable to proceed with planned operations.
Professor Shuster’s well-intentioned suggestion is another example of trying to achieve herd immunity painlessly. It is not possible to do so. Dr John Dagpunar
Mathematics Department University of Southampton