Mitigation and herd immunity strategy for COVID-19 is likely to fail

Wolfgang Bock; Barbara Adamik; Marek Bawiec; Viktor Bezborodov; Marcin Bodych; Jan Pablo Burgard; Thomas Goetz; Tyll Krueger; Agata Migalska; Barbara Pabjan; Tomasz Ozanski; Ewaryst Rafajlowicz; Wojciech Rafajlowicz,; Ewa Skubalska-Rafajlowicz; Sara Ryfczynska; Ewa Szczurek; Piotr Szymanski

Mitigation of a novel infectious disease with the aim to reach herd immunity is a classical textbook concept in epidemiology and has been successfully applied in the past, foremost in the case of novel influenza strains [1] [2] [3] . The idea is simple: in the absence of a vaccination for a novel infectious disease one tries to flatten the incidence curve to such an extent that the daily number of cases that require medical assistance is kept below the capacity of the health care system. The long term goals are to obtain a sufficiently large fraction of the population that has become infected and to reach herd immunity which would lead to a less severe or even subcritical second outbreak wave. On the other hand, an extinction strategy would aim at introducing sufficient contact reductions to keep the epidemic subcritical and not lifting these restrictions until the disease becomes extinct.