My last point on this regarding comments above. You build up immunity to fight viruses before they become an illness, so you have had flu many times. The dead flu vaccine predicts new strains as flu mutats. This virus appears as Merkel stated, to spread easily like the cold virus. WE HAVE NO IMMUNITY AS THIS IS A BRAND NEW VIRUS.
Every day we get cancer approx 5 times and it is killed by anti bodies. This is all about building herd immunity and some really stupid decisions are being made. Read the article by the CMO.

Frank Nouble 3 wrote:

Caradog wrote:

pembsexile wrote:

Caradog wrote:Crazy and scary decision made by some very uneducated people. This virus will be around for ever and we will all catch it at some point! Govt advisers were trying to build linear herd immunity with manageable admissions to hospital. Now we may have an unmanageable peak in cases like Italy. Well done! The hysterical stupids win again!

Incorrect. We will not all catch it at some point. In the same way that not all people catch the flu or catch a cold. Did everyone catch SARS or Ebola? Of course not.

Apparently there is already a vaccine but it is in the early stages of development. It could possibly be another year before it is ready for general use.

Doing nothing is not an option. The primary reason for stopping mass gatherings is so that the virus does not effect as many primary healthcare workers as it otherwise would. If the NHS and GP surgery staff has up to 20% of people off with either self isolation or sickness then the vulnerable people in society will really suffer. Whatever the government do, they will be criticised but they have to do something. They, and the sports authorities are not the ‘hysterical stupids’.

Surely even the most basic common sense would tell you this is a very different virus than SARS and Ebola. Our bodies are full of viruses. Have you ever had a cold? Good luck not getting it! Come back in a few months and let me know. An apology will be nice!

Hopefully think you are wrong there.
Am 70 only had my first flu injection recently and in 70 years never had flu.
Think that's over the top slightly.
This is not a cold by the way but agree with some of your points

He is Frank. People need to be aware that SARS is a Coronavirus. This one is different to SARS but society will eventually beat it. Management, caution and good hygiene are the answers for the moment. It will be a long struggle.

SARS is the disease, Coronavirus is the pathogen. The 2003 SARS outbreak was caused by a different strain of Coronavirus.

Marky wrote:SARS is the disease, Coronavirus is the pathogen. The 2003 SARS outbreak was caused by a different strain of Coronavirus.

To pedantise further, the disease in the news currently is covid-19 (from 'coronavirus disease 2019') and the virus is officially called SARS-CoV-2 (from 'severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2').

And just picking up on the "I've never had flu" statement, further up the page. In a narrow sense, yes, it's possible. However, it's a vanishingly small probability that any individual having reached the age stated will have avoided being infected with the flu virus. In short, I believe that person, Frank, is likely mistaken.

This is because exposure to a virus doesn't mean you will get sick. Viral load is important (and minimizing it), and how an individual's immune system reacts to the virus is a factor.

On the latter point, there has been at least one small-scale study on deliberately infecting responders and non-responders with flu virus and following their infection course with bloodwork and genetic analyses. All subjects had the virus circulating in their systems. They were infected with flu. However, some people's immune systems resisted the virus, so much so that they, the non-responders (who had flu), had no symptoms or symptoms so mild that they would think they'd never had an infection, but other people's immune systems go into overdrive. Why this is so is still an open research question.

So, while I don't believe Frank never had the flu, I can fully believe Frank never had the flu's debilitating effects.

And of course, asymptomatics who "never get the flu" can still be infectious and pass the virus on (or bacteria, à la Typhoid Mary). They are important vectors of virus transmission, but they are difficult to account for in modelling.