Definitely insane, here's why: In order to get to herd immunity, you need something around 60% of the population to get infected and thus immunized [0] (there'

Definitely insane, here's why: In order to get to herd immunity, you need something around 60% of the population to get infected and thus immunized [0] (there's a big assumption here already, that immunity lasts forever, might well be wrong). The UK's population is 66 million people, so that's about 40 million who need to get sick. Let's assume 2% of cases require intensive care (it's closer to 10% in Italy right now [1], but we can assume for the sake of this calculation that the UK has the superpower to isolate people over 65 or so perfectly). That's 800000 people who will require intensive care! There are about 4000 ICU beds in the UK [2]. Let's assume, again highly optimistally, that only 50% are occupied, so 2000 are available for Covid19-patients. Covid19 patients may need to spend 7 days in the ICU [1], which means there can be up to 286 new Covid19 patients starting intensive care each day. You can see where this is going. At that rate, it would take 2797 days to reach herd immunity. It's utterly nonsensical. We will hopefully have a vaccine way, way before that. What this "herd immunity" strategy is actually going to do is lead to a total break-down of the hospital system in the UK, if the government doesn't change course real soon now. [0] This is 1-(1/R_0), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity and unmitigated R_0 is around 3 for SARS-CoV-2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... [1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-answers-covid-19/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/03/icu-doctor-nhs-coronavirus-pandemic-hospitals https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/03/icu-do...