Brit here:<p>I'm not a fan of Dominic's government, but the response seems to be well motivated by a series of reasonable arguments. As I understand it:<p>1. We either get herd immunity via infection or cure/end every case of the virus in the world. They discard the latter as impossible given the infection rate and forecast time-to-vaccine.<p>2. The counterfactual/needless damage done will be deaths due to NHS capacity saturation, which is a function of (maximum simultaneously infected) - (nhs capacity at that time).<p>3. Most controversially, they argue that people are going to be shit at implementing isolation policies of the needed severity, in the particular sense that the effectiveness of isolation measures will drop over time. That seems quite likely to me, having met some humans before. Hard to tell / interested in studies if anyone can point to some.<p>4. As a consequence of these things, the goal is to pass severe measures later than now (but perhaps at a relative point in time similar to italy's) such that during the period of these measures many young people will be sitting out the infection without passing it on, and the infection rate will fall to avoid saturating the NHS.<p>Or, put another way, they are going to do everything the US is doing but in about 7-14 days, as opposed to now, because the limited period of effective social isolation will hit a more high-growth period, and more young people will be sitting it out and becoming immune.<p>This doesn't sound super-obviously wrongheaded to me. It's unclear what the plan in the US is. Lockdown for ever? Lockdown-till-cure? Lockdown till herd immunity is pretty equivalent to the UK strategy, and seems likely to be the outcome. But herd immunity takes longer to achieve the earlier you start measures.