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?:abstract
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The rapid growth in cases of COVID-19 has threatened to overwhelm healthcare systems in multiple countries In response, severely affected countries have had to consider a range of public health strategies achieved by implementing non-pharmaceutical interventions Broadly, these strategies have fallen into two categories: i) \'mitigation\', which aims to achieve herd immunity by allowing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to spread through the population while mitigating disease burden, and ii) \'suppression\', aiming to drastically reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates and halt endogenous transmission in the target population Using an age-structured transmission model, parameterised to simulate SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the UK, we assessed the prospects of success using both of these approaches We simulated a range of different non-pharmaceutical intervention scenarios incorporating social distancing applied to differing age groups We found that it is possible to suppress SARS-CoV-2 transmission if social distancing measures are sustained at a sufficient level for a period of months Our modelling did not support achieving herd immunity as a practical objective, requiring an unlikely balancing of multiple poorly-defined forces Specifically, we found that: i) social distancing must initially reduce the transmission rate to within a narrow range, ii) to compensate for susceptible depletion, the extent of social distancing must be vary over time in a precise but unfeasible way, and iii) social distancing must be maintained for a long duration (over 6 months)
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