COVID-19: ESSENCE AND BENEFITS OF A #NEARZERO STRATEGY

Many of the problems we are experiencing with COVID-19 can be solved by adopting, pursuing and maintaining a #NearZero strategy:

• Minimising the number of deaths and people suffering from LongCOVID 
• Letting daily life such as schools and work get back to near-normal
• Let the economy properly recover

Here are further details of what #Nearzero means.  In essence:

• COVID-19 is too infectious to be eradicated worldwide for years, if ever.  We'll have to live with the threat of importing the disease for the foreseeable future

• An elimination strategy such as being adopted by New Zealand is proving very difficult, and arguably impractical long term.  The virus can all too easily get in a country via a person, material and/or animal despite very tight control:
• Cold-storage goods are suspected as a potential source, such as imported food.  
• Animal coats may be a problem, being a 'surface' that can harbour the virus, even if the animal does not catch the disease itself.

• The financial and social 'costs' of the restrictions that would be needed to fulfil an elimination strategy are high.  That would be justified for a coronavirus disease such as MERS, which killed one in three people infected. The balance for COVID-19 needs to be different, taking into account that its consequences are bad but not as bad as MERS.  Life has to go on.

• So we need to find a way to live with COVID-19, best done at very low levels

• The elimination strategy proposed by Independent SAGE has been reviewed by other professionals.  They have concluded that it is overly-ambitious, requiring restrictions that would be both impractical and too harsh for the UK

• Which means we need as an international community to get to #NearZero, very low levels of infection, with ways to keep us there.  Without the draconian measures adopted in New Zealand

This is a summary of the benefits:

An example of doing 'normal' activities would be getting my hair cut safely.

What do you say?