Britain Will Achieve Herd Immunity on Monday

According to a Telegraph exclusive, the number of people with protection either through vaccination or previous infection will hit 73.4% on April 12th – the herd immunity threshold. Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph’s Science Editor, has more.

Britain will pass the threshold for herd immunity on Monday, according to dynamic modelling by University College London (UCL), placing more pressure on the Government to move faster in releasing restrictions.
According to the UCL results, published this week, the number of people who have protection against the virus either through vaccination or previous infection will hit 73.4% on April 12th – enough to tip the country into herd immunity.
The number is in stark contrast to the modelling released by Imperial College this week, which suggested there was just 34% protection by the end of March.
Last week, antibody testing by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggested that, in the week ending March 14th, around 54% of people in England already had antibodies to the virus, and slightly less in the devolved nations.
Since then, a further 7.1 million people have received a first dose of vaccine and nearly 100,000 have tested positive for the virus, with many more acquiring a silent, asymptomatic infection.
It is thought about one in 10 people also have some innate immunity through infections with other coronaviruses – pushing population-level protection up further – while others may be immune through T-cells, which would not be picked up in antibody testing.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: At the end of this story there is a very encouraging note about the Government’s unhappiness with the models SPI-M is relying on for the latest advice it’s feeding the Government via SAGE. Interestingly, almost all the points the Government has raised are points raised by Glen Bishop and others on Lockdown Sceptics.

The Telegraph understands that the Government is unhappy with the pessimistic tone set by models produced by SPI-M, released earlier this week, and has asked other groups to critique the work. The SPI-M summary, presented to SAGE, suggested the roadmap out of lockdown was “highly likely” to lead to increased hospital cases and deaths this summer.
The models were criticised for using out of date and flawed assumptions about levels of population immunity and effectiveness of the vaccine as well as failing to factor in reductions in transmission due to vaccination and seasonality.
Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, said: “In my 20-plus years as a doctor, I’ve never come across a summer surge in a respiratory infection in the UK. The modelling now keeps changing dramatically, so it’s hard to see how it helps us. What we really want to do is look at the real-world data and make decisions from there.
“One of the problems is nobody is going back and checking whether the modelling matched up with the reality. We know that modelling in schools has not helped us because it was incorrect. So we need to have a reality check.”

Stop Press 2: Matt Hancock has dismissed claims that herd immunity will be reached next week. The Times has the story.

[The Health Secretary] appeared unmoved by the optimistic claims. “I was told by some scientists that we were going to have herd immunity in May and then in June and then after that,” he told LBC.
“What I prefer to do is watch the data. We’ve set out the roadmap, the roadmap is really clear. It is our route back to normal. We’re on track to meet the roadmap and that is our goal.”
Pressed on why he was not accepting UCL’s claims, Hancock replied: “I think we have taken the right course in plotting our way to freedom and doing it carefully because we want it to be irreversible. We have seen what happens when this virus gets going and we are seeing it getting going right now on the continent and other parts of the world – some of the scenes are really appalling.
“We want to get out of this safely and irreversibly and that’s why we set out the roadmap.”

Also worth reading in full.