Well I respect you honestly hold that view and have reasons you have mentioned. However I think you need to be very careful in thinking that the only consequences of such a change in behaviour are those you have mentioned and nothing else.

There is plenty of evidence for example to suggest regular exposure to run of the mill colds and flus is actually helpful in ensuring a healthy immune system, and there are other problems I have mentioned. It is therefore not beyond reasonable to think that going for this isolation type approach might lead to worse outcomes in the future. I am sure there are also many other things it could lead to which I can’t even begin to imagine.

I think for me it comes down to a question of 'would I want to sit next to me the way I am today?'.

(Emphasis mine)
Not so much, those are old remnants of eugenics from the 19th century. Every action of your life stimulates your immune system (eating, washing your teeth, drinking, going out) simply because your body (externally and internally) is constantly invaded by pathogens and externals agents. All the time. There are no need to be sick to stimulate it.
Exception applies if you have bone marrow cancer and live in a sterile bubble in a specialized institution and for new born who would spend the first 10 months of their life fully isolated.

Omicron update for the UK, last data input was 19 January, and with a week of data, about 250,000 samples and excluding historical corrections (mainly removing a heap of previous but recent Alpha cases which were actually Omicron)

Omicron 99.3%
Delta 0.3%
VUI-21OCT-01 0.3%
Others including Alpha 0.1%

Variant Under Investigation for 21 October is also known as AY.4.2 or Delta Plus, which popped up at the latter stages of the Delta surge, in November, and then got swamped by Omicron. The Plus bit is misleading, it wasn't more worrying than Delta itself, and seems to just be a random mutation.

This used to be the symphony aired on every Tube carriage from October to April effectively.

Daily data:

Cases 95,787 (99,652 last Friday)
Deaths 288 (270)
Patients admitted 1,974 (2,429 on the 10th)
Patients in hospital 17,976 (19,598 on the 13th)
Patients in ventilation beds 664 (777 on the 13th)
People vaccinated up to and including 19 January 2022:
First dose: 52,186,398
Second dose: 48,082,636
Booster: 36,753,644

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now down 27.3% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is up 0.5%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 268.3 today.

I'll highlight the bit you obviously missed "perhaps use it as a "warning" to people that could actually do something about their overall health"

I suspect they are very different. But that's fine isn't it?

I'm not sure there's evidence that infections improve a generalised immune response.

You might be conflating Strachan's hygiene hypothesis, which focussed on links between childhood exposure to pathogens and later incidences of allergies, and the observations of immunisation achieved through infection that triggered Jenner's development of the science around vaccination.

While a degree of immunity can certainly be achieved through infection, that protection can be short-lived and very specific to the nature and configuration of the pathogen. Which is why we get colds and (maybe) flu every year, and why we might need to tweak covid vaccines to match the challenges of virus mutations.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger might have worked for Nietzsche, but it's not a philosophy physicians generally accept.

You are not sure being infected with a virus and recovering means you have any immune response beyond that exact specific strain of virus? That is certainly an interesting little thesis :)

I'm certain that recovery from a viral infection can promote a level of immunisation against the pathogen that caused the infection. That's the science behind vaccines.

But the idea that infection "insures a healthy immune system" is, well, difficult to support. Indeed, there's evidence that some infections trigger auto-immune responses.


The notion that the walking wounded, those who stay away from work because of colds and flu but feel well enough to work from home, should be in the office boosting the immune systems of colleagues is one you might find even more difficult to support.

We still don't know a lot about how this works with COVID-19, other than that clearly some people can get reinfections even if vaccinated, more so if unvaccinated. At the moment around 10 to 15% of current infections are reinfections, typically they had Alpha or vanilla COVID, a few have had Delta then Omicron. I know some people are touting natural immunity, usually for unscientific reasons, but the evidence, if anything, the data points against this since people who are unvaccinated are twice as likely to be reinfected than those on two recent vaccines. Boosters will make that a stronger case. Source: ONS. Therefore if this was an epidemic without special measures, and people were going into the office with mild COVID, the situation would be a lot worse. We also know that people can and do get influenza and other respriratory diseases year after year, so immunity for that viral complex is either very targeted or fairly short in duration, and probably a mix of both. For influenza these extra-prone people tend to be best off getting the vaccine and taking preventative measures rather than thinking "it if I get it then it will make me stronger" - typically it's a neutral or negative effect.

T cells are the complex bit to this. So T cells can mount a immunity defence against respiratory diseases but it can be inefficient, slow and/or still makes it a highly unpleasant experience. Plus we don't know a lot about T cell response and COVID (or many other immune response scenarios for that matter). This is the nearest we can get to supporting a natural immunity argument, and it's flimsy science at the moment.

The upshot - and sheer commonsense says - that there is no obvious advantage in being ill, and considerable advantages in trying not to be ill. Now I say all of that, while still believing that we must not let our lives be over-dominated by just one virus, and I'm optimistic that we can get back to a more normal situation in the weeks ahead. However we better learn from our experiences or we will be condemned to repeating it.

I am aware that there is some evidence cropping up of NHS staff are getting infected with Omicron twice. One hospital I have insights into has had a significant outbreak of COVID in staff on a particular ward several times since Omicron arrived, and there have been multiple instances of staff testing positive twice with the typical "mild" Omicron symptoms, and I understand for some individuals that their PCR tests have confirmed a double Omicron infection.

Whilst the NHS staffing situation is considerably better than it was a few weeks ago it's still very far from anything resembling good, and wards are being shut down or bed capacity restricted from time to time.

This is a somewhat fraught area. NHS staff would be different, but generally speaking people cannot have 2 PCRs within 90 days, and therefore not have their tests double sequenced within that time frame. There are a number of reasons for this but the starting point is that generally speaking we don't think people can get COVID twice in 90 days, plus the risk of dead viral particles from an old infection,, so we aren't going to be using resources to test for it. So yes I have heard that some PCRs are showing two Omicron infections for the same person, these would come from the small section of the community that would have access to PCRs within 90 days, notably NHS staff and travellers. Up to now we would say "it's the same infection", whereas I suspect the people concerned would say "oh no it's not, it's a second infection". It's one of those times where there isn't a neat easy answer I can give at this point. Hopefully we will know more when, um, we know more.