From Elimination to Herd Immunity?

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The experience of last year [1, 2, 3] suggested quite strongly in favour of elimination as a strategy for SARS-Cov-2, rather than a suppression strategy. After the experiences of the original and alpha strains of SARS-Cov-2, it should be quite clear by the numbers that "go hard, go fast" is a successful approach. It means restricting movement and interaction between people (the virus doesn't move, people do), putting up strong fences to demarcate an area and block the potential entry of the infected.

The results speak for themselves; from Australian states like Victoria, which remarkably reached elimination from high numbers, Western Australia, and Tasmania, to countries like New Zealand, Taiwan, and China. The strategy of trying to achieve zero cases was a proven success, with the three aforementioned countries having the lowest case numbers per capita in the developed world. As a grim irony to those who recommended that a policy of suppression in fear of the economic damage that an elimination strategy would cause, the numbers do not lie; those countries and regions that adopted an elimination strategy were able to recover quickly and more completely and there suffered less economic damage than those which did not [4].
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