Most people have already had the virus

In a paper published by Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, she and her colleagues argue that, based on their model, 68% of people were infected with Covid-19 by mid-March.^[1] She also argued, in an interview with The Guardian, that locking down the economy and enacting a mandatory stay-at-home policy is a drastic solution to a problem that does not exist, saying that the cost of a lockdown is far greater than the cost of the virus.^[2] Her model suggests that if the virus was present in Britain a month earlier than thought—December rather than January—then cases would skyrocket, but the fatality rate would be a fraction of the 1% it's thought to be. This is the case because of herd immunity, the idea that if a large swath of a population is infected with the disease and then recovers, the likelihood of future infection or death is minimal. Gupta argues for an increase in antibody testing—a test to see whether healthy people have the antibodies to fight off Covid-19, or to show they've been previously infected—is needed to prove her theory, and that she believes current antibody data is inaccurate and outdated. A separate study published by researchers at the University of Manchester argues that by the second week of April, almost 27% of the UK population—16 million people—had already had Covid-19.^[3] While the virus is dangerous and wreaked havoc on a predominantly older population, the peak has passed. A one-size-fits-all solution to a lockdown does more harm than good.