‘Suppress and release’ plan still means letting virus spread, with huge loss of life – just in a series of peaks instead of one

Earlier this week, spooked by public outcry and a university report telling them that their plan would kill hundreds of thousands of people – something the SKWAWKBOX warned weeks ago – the Tories claimed that achieving ‘herd immunity‘ was not their policy.

Herd immunity would mean simply managing the spread of the virus but allowing it to continue until almost everyone has been infected and those who recover have antibodies against the virus. At current mortality rates, vast numbers of people in this country would die.

But the Tories and their advisers have not abandoned their plan. As a BBC presentation of the government’s strategy made absolutely clear last night, all that has changed is the chart and language they are using to describe it:

Even the new language used still makes clear that the plan is to allow the virus to infect people – to “suppress and release” it.

To “turn it on and off like a tap”.

The Tories claim they can do this with enough control to prevent NHS intensive care units being overwhelmed. But even if they were right, the death rate of the virus even under ideal treatment circumstances would mean a strategy of deliberately allowing huge numbers of people to die each time they ‘turn on the tap’.

They’d just do it over a longer period – instead of ‘taking it on the chin’ all at once, as Boris Johnson described it originally. And as a vaccine is at least a year away, the total numbers involved will still be huge.

The Tory ‘herd immunity’ plan has not gone away. Anything but. It has just changed its clothes.

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