As of this writing, there is no known cure for Covid19.
If nothing is done, entire population will eventually catch the virus and around 1% of them will die.
If we could confirm who are immune to the virus then we can easily identify the vulnerable and ask everyone else to carry on with life as usual. However, the problem is, other than identifying aged people (e.g. those with 65 years and above) and those with existing health conditions (e.g. obesity, cardiac issues, diabetes etc.) there is no finer way to identify the risk group. Even them, some young and healthy people are randomly affected in a serious manner, even resulting to death!
Millions of people around the world have got infected with Covid19. Some have suffered no or mild symptoms only. However, due to very little testing carried out, majority of people who think they have got Covid19 and recovered, have no way to confirm that that is actually the case!
The crux of the problem here is how to identify people who got Covid19, then recovered and thus assumed immune to it. These people can then come out of lock down and start leading a pre-Covid19 life.
So how do you confirm this? This is where the difficulty lies.
Presence of the virus can be confirmed in 2 ways – swab test and antibody test.
The swab test shows if the virus is present at the point in time (when patient is tested).
Although there are cases for person being affected again after recovery, but in this writing we are assuming subsequent infection would not be fatal .
Now if we take a person A, who got infected by Covid19 but suffered only mild symptoms and recovered after 21 days, then the question remains how to prove it? He can be tested for antibody and if IgG antibody is found, a reasonable conclusion can be drawn that person A is immune from Covid19 going forward.
But this approach has a major hurdle. Firstly, antibody test is not yet available to everyone. Secondly, by the time antibody test is available to everyone, the concerned person may have lost the antibody from his blood stream. In this case, it is back to square one!
To the public, person A is having same risk of person B. But in reality person A is possibly immune and carry far less risk than person B. But there is no way to prove it.
For person B, there is a risk that he could suffer mild symptom or sever symptom and could even die.
If the immunity can be proved beyond doubt, then it is a valid exit strategy.
Without proper tests, we have to adopt any of following situations.
[1] Lives saved but economy damaged
Continue lock down indefinitely. If everyone remains isolated, no one will get infected, hence no one is contagious and no new person gets infected. But this will destroy the economy and livelihood of billions of people. This is not acceptable solution to public – even though this is actually best solution for saving maximum amount of lives. After sometime public may revolt and might just start their normal life anyway.
[2] Economy survives but high number of casualties
Allow people to carry on as usual and achieve so called herd immunity. This means allowing everyone to catch the virus and accept 1% death of overall population. Effectively a situation a very large number of random people will die. This scenario does not try to prevent infection, rather relies entirely on individual’s body immunity to tackle the virus.
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