COVID-19—a very visible pandemic

[...]it was precisely owing to its differences with Sweden that the UK, where herd immunity was initially adopted as the strategy, decided in late March, 2020, to depart from its earlier policy position and enforce a strict lockdown.2 For that reason, it would be a fallacy to compare the mortality rate of Sweden with that of the UK and Spain—both countries that introduced lockdowns (on March 23 in the UK and March 14 in Spain) well after the number of deaths in each country due to COVID-19 exceeded 100.3,4 An appraisal of the effectiveness of the herd immunity strategy would be better facilitated if Sweden's mortality rates were compared with that of countries that imposed lockdowns early on in their COVID-19 trajectories. More crucially, proposing a “relaxed strategy”1 overlooks the real possibility of health-care systems being overwhelmed, especially in countries with susceptible populations and few resource settings. South Korea has been practising fast testing, high-tech tracing, and zero-tolerance isolation as the three pillars to manage the COVID-19 crisis.6 Similarly, Taiwan has adopted a strategy of border control, case identification, and containment.7 In both South Korea and Taiwan, the aforementioned measures have also been complemented with mandatory mask-wearing, one of the remnants of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome experience.8 There is now considerable emerging evidence that wearing a simple surgical mask could be effective in preventing transmission.9 I agree that a hard lockdown strategy will only slow down and delay, but not entirely eliminate, cases of the infection.