The UK has been under strict social distancing measures for well over a month now, with current regulations only permitting Brits to leave their houses for food, health reasons or work.
Now, an academic at Cambridge Judge Business School has put forward a controversial alternative to social distancing.
Dr Chris Hope, Emeritus Reader in Policy Modelling at Cambridge Judge Business School, claims that ‘voluntary exposure’ to coronavirus could be used as an alternative.
Under this approach healthy people could choose to be infected with COVID-19 and then stay at home until no longer infections.
According to Dr Hope, these people ‘would then be able to resume something closer to normal life’.
In his working paper, which is yet to be published, he explained: “So assume a healthy individual has a choice: A. social distance until the emergency is over, or they are infected anyway, or B. choose voluntary exposure now, with testing, isolation and then immunity.
“Voluntary exposure will nearly always be effective in causing infection, as the illness appears to be transmitted easily. As the infection occurs in a controlled manner, there is no extra risk to those outside the household.
“Social distancing leads to a quality of life drop, loss of earnings, later infection or no infection.”
Dr Hope suggests that voluntary exposure could allow people to ‘near-normal life’ much sooner.
He said: “Which is better if I’m given a choice, voluntary exposure or social distancing?
“The basic tradeoff is that voluntary exposure allows me to obtain an earlier return to near-normal life, and a certainty that I’m not infecting others outside my household in exchange for increasing the small chance that I will suffer major symptoms, possibly death, since under social distancing I may not get infected at all.”
People at high risk or with pre-existing conditions would not be offered such voluntary exposure, according to Dr Hope.
He added: “For a young, healthy, single person, the analysis shows that they could suffer less than half the overall harm under voluntary exposure than they do under continued social distancing.”
