[2008guy]

The answer seems so obvious. Do a hard, air tight quarantine of people of advanced age. People who are borderline or sick are told to stay inside. Encourage the rest of society to go about business as usual. Provide government support for all of it. Some people will die but probably less than if we have to do this over and over again without ever gaining herd immunity. And few enough to massively ease the burden on hospitals. And it’s the best way to avoid Great Depression 2020.

[alkonaut]

Those most at risk are those requiring care. An 80+ person with some illness with typical assistance at home might meet 20+ working age people in a week. That can probably be scaled down in the name of caution to say 5, but it's unlikely to be the same 5 every week because of staff turnover, illness.

It's the same whether you receive care at home or in an assisted living facility.

Even without such care, a lot of these people regularly need hospital care for things that aren't covid. Many have regular scheduled visits to doctors for blood pressure medication tweaks and similar. You could isolate the healthy 70 year olds quite well, but not the sick 80 year olds.

[2008guy]

But prove that this matters. How many people are in that group? Is it not possible to quarantine the workers?

[alkonaut]

Prove that what matters? That they meet tons of working age people?

As you say you can expand the circle of isolation. All the at-risk patients (Say people over 65 and all adults with preexisting conditions). Then you isolate those people that they have to interact with. For example all staff at all nursing homes where any such person lives. But you quickly end up where you started. All the people who work in all the nursing homes have kids and spouses. They can't see those people when they aren't working, and then return to work with the risk group. They'd need to take their kids out of school for example (remember the point of all this is to make the rest of society work normally, schools are open). It's hard.

It's probably easier then to designate people as high risk "patients" and treat them with full protective clothing, move them to special homes where care can be given with more protection and so on. But that also requires 3 things: lots of staff, lots of protective gear, lots of time to set up. I don't think there is a surplus of any of those things. It might be something to consider for the long term.

[marknutter]

Then test the caregivers too. That's still far less difficult than quarantining everyone.

[alkonaut]

When tests are cheap, available and provide results in hours, that might be possible. You’ll have thousands of people who need testing every day.

[gyulai]

...keep in mind, that it may be the case that we're being lied to when we're told that young and healthy people have nothing to fear. The following article seems to suggest otherwise: https://www.propublica.org/article/a-medical-worker-describe...

[gyulai]

Another data point: The following source gives additional detail on the kind of thing that is meant by "preexisting condition" when they say "people without preexisting conditions have nothing to fear". One of them is high blood pressure. Who doesn't have high blood pressure, these days.

https://www.cebm.net/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/

[marknutter]

As frightening as they are, these appear to be outlier cases.