Increasing case numbers is not a bad thing per se.
Increasing deaths obviously is.
In Stockholm, they are approaching 30% infection rate.
As they approach 50%, deaths will increasingly decline due to herd immunity. The virus will have basically burnt itself out.
So in their case, high infection incidence is a good thing, (as long as at the same time you put better and better measures in place to protect those who are most likely to experience serious or life-threatening symptoms).
That's Stockholm. In the more rural, sparsely populated parts of Sweden, the infection wave will continue for a while and so will deaths.
So Stockholm will have zero issue with coming out of lockdown, precisely because they didn't have one in the first place.
The stricter the lockdown, the harder it is to exit.
It's why keeping the reproduction rate below 1 is ultimately a somewhat daft notion and not a good idea. How long do you artificially restrict transmission by a rigid lockdown?
Forever?
And relying on a vaccine is not a good idea either.
Maybe one will be available in a year. But maybe it will only work for a year. And maybe it will only work in some of the population.
But I suppose it will further diminish the 'at risk' population to some degree.
There is no vaccine for SARS or MERS because as those diseases died a natural death, there was no incentive or profit in developing a vaccine.
There is no fully effective AIDS vaccine come to that.
Once Covid-19 becomes endemic, it will be only a little worse than seasonal flu.
And we really don't care one jot about seasonal flu.
Covid-19 may even just largely disappear like SARS and MERS.
Anyway, in the US, you have a full range of test scenarios in the different approaches adopted state by state.
So time will tell.
And bringing it back to NWBO and our trial. I imagine that in the UK, wherever a personal visit is required to complete a patient record and data file, there will be delay because of UK lockdown.
And if UK data checking and finalisation is delayed, then so will be trial datalock.
