Could 30 per cent of Brits have some Covid immunity?

How big is the job of vaccination? The aim is herd immunity, to protect enough people so that the virus starts to run out of people to infect and rates fall. This is expected to happen when between 60 to 80 per cent of the population is protected, so quite a job for the NHS. Until this is achieved, ministers seek to use lockdown as a tool to keep the R below 1. This means the cycle of lockdown and release could be with us for some time, especially in light of the new ‘mutant’ strain of the virus. But are ministers seeing the whole picture?

As a professor of risk management, my coronavirus modelling has shown a large gap in the data on coronavirus cases between the government’s dashboard figures and the ONS weekly surveillance data. It’s a gap that could be explained by a basic fact: that a large chunk of the population, perhaps as many as 30 per cent of us, already have a significant degree of immunity to the virus.