A home-made movie showing a man in his backyard using a bucket of water to explain the British government's strategy for tackling the coronavirus has gone viral.
Robert Isaacs, a podiatrist, posted a video of himself filling up a plastic bottle to help explain how the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) could be overwhelmed if coronavirus cases in the country peak.
In the video, he fills a large bucket with water, which he says represents the British population. He then gradually pours this into the plastic bottle, which represents the NHS.
"There's been a few people talking about the government strategy on Covid and wondering why we're not shutting everything down now. Italy has done it, everyone else has done it. Why are we not doing it? Well, it is counter-intuitive, so it is sort of worth unwrapping, but it does make a certain amount of sense," he states.
As he fills the plastic bottle gradually, water pours out of the hole cut into it, representing people getting better and being discharged from hospital. But if people use NHS services all at once there's a greater risk of vulnerable people dying from the disease. "That's the situation that we need to avoid," he states.
If people are forced to quarantine themselves for a number of weeks right now, and the government shuts services down, the risk is that a mass of people will then become sick when they start to leave their homes after the quarantine period.
"The plan for the next few weeks is to allow some infections to happen but not over-top (the plastic bottle – or the NHS)."
"At that point when it's right at the top (the NHS is at full capacity), now this is where you need the quarantine," Isaacs states.
"This strategy is not my idea, I'm a podiatrist not an epidemiologist, but it's a very good time to listen to, and amplify the people who ARE experts," he wrote under his YouTube video.
The British government initially said it would rely on "herd immunity," where a number of people become ill and then build up resistance to the virus. But on Monday, this changed to a strategy where the government has encouraged people to distance themselves socially and avoid pubs, clubs and crowded spaces, partly influenced by a report from Imperial College London that explained different interventions to reduce deaths and demands on health providers.