388/50,000=0.7%

If we let covid have free reign with 40m people unprotected and assume the above death rate we get 40m*0.7%=310,400 deaths. You will need the unprotected population to be much lower than 40m before allowing covid free reign. Furthermore, if we give covid free reign these cases will be very bunched together, which means more likely hospitals become overwhelmed

I hope the above demonstrates why this unfortunate episode in our lives is not yet over and why we need to continue with restrictions until the vaccination programme has done its magic

Additionally, the vaccine only protects against variants of covid not resistant to it. A zero covid strategy provides us with protection to both resistant and non-resistant variants. Therefore the optimal strategy is to get cases as low as possible before opening up so that all new cases thereon can be effectively tracked and genome sequenced to enable new vaccines to be created as quickly as possible. Without this we will be back to square one when a new variant gets out of control. A new variant is not a possibility, in my eyes it is a guarantee whilst we have an uncoordinated global response in a globalised world. We need to mitigate the possibility of a new variant spreading throughout the UK and a zero covid strategy is the best way of doing this