Trillions have been spent in the US on bailouts. You could have paid for full time care for every single vulnerable person for a year at that cost, and left everyone else to live normally.
And how would this presumably completely non-disease-transmissible full time care manifest itself? With doctors and nurses that also have kids, and social lives, and thus a chance to transmit disease.
Presumably medical professionals would be tested frequently and would a much higher sterilization standards and training than the average person. They'd of course still use n95 masks and perhaps even full body suits when they are present.
We should gauge our society on how we treat our most vulnerable people, and if this is how people want to shape our society then stop the train and let me get off.
Locking up vulnerable people in quasi-concentration camps staffed by hazmat suit wearing doctors administering ‘care’ in the most basic and cruel manner is no way to treat any human being live, let alone a group of lab rats. I’d challenge anyone advocating this nonsense to lock themselves away for six months with only the most basic/essential of interactions and see how they get on. This lack of empathy or any sense of understanding of human nature and sociability is absolutely absurd.
I don’t really see what you’re objecting to. Locking up a part of the population is strictly better than locking up the whole population. You could even make it optional! “High-risk individuals welcome to go to protection centres”
You’re deriding this approach as “nonsense” but your reasoning seems illogical to me. And washing it with words like “empathy” and “sociability” doesn’t help, since it comes off as the worst kind of virtue signaling, employing shaming disguised as a moral superiority.
I agree being locked down would be tough. But that’s what we are asking EVERYONE to do right now. Why should the elderly or vulnerable not have to bear the burden of THEIR evaluation of the risks, by being quarantined, instead of subjecting the entire rest of the world to lockdowns just so they can have a better (sooner) path to normal for themselves? That just looks to me like a selfish imposition on everyone else.
I don’t understand what point you’re making about challenging people to lock themselves away for six months with only basic interactions. That’s the current situation we’re in. And yes it is especially bad for the young, who need socialization, education, play time, and even simply to see faces/emotions without a mask. We are sacrificing their well being and future to do what - give the elderly a faster path out of their own quarantine or a few more years towards the end of their life? It’s a bad trade off and is highly unjust towards the young.
Lastly, we should gauge a society based on how we treat people’s fundamental rights, especially in a difficult situation. A society that gives up those rights easily and advocates for coercive governmental controls is not a great society.
It's not just a question of paying for the care for vulnerable persons. But young people sometimes also want to see their parents at least a few times a year, even if they aren't vulnerable and can care for themselves.
Wouldn't having a nurse or some other full time trained person present be more effective than anything at helping keep "young people" from getting too close? And if these "young people" are out of control, how does lockdown help anyway?
people who are affected are not just 90yo that need a nurse, there's a ton of people in their 60s and 70s (>2% chance of death by covid) who live a normal life and don't want to be locked in a room and cut from everyone else.
The lockdown helps because it protects people who don't care too, by relying on those who do _just a bit_.
Sadly, the option of segregating all at-risk people is not reasonably feasible.
As for those who don’t want to be locked in a room - sounds like they want to have it both ways - just the right amount of risk reduction and a sooner path to living their lives freely. But why is their desire for a normal life more important than others’ desire? Why should others have to give up their freedoms and endure an extended lockdown to enable them, instead of living their lives freely now?
but I wrote "in their 60s and 70s", replacing people 50-59 with 70-79 will obviously give you different results.
I agree with you, people want to have it both ways and it's easy to get upset with them, but that's how the world is, and if the healthcare system gets overwhelmed because of people who don't care everyone else still suffers.
For polio, only 0.5 % of those who contracted polio had nervous system symptoms. Of this small minority that developed muscle weakness, about 2 to 5 percent of children and 15 to 30 percent of adults died.
Still, it was a frightening disease, until it was eradicated by vaccines (except where it wasn't: now that covid has brought the world's focus back to vaccines, we should do something about that, too.)
In Italy those are exactly the super-spreaders who caused a spike of death in most ISOLATED caring homes in which only they could enter.
For your plan to remotely work you would have to:
- totally isolate the people over an age limit that you want to keep out of society, assuming they don't are still working and/or have the money to stay isolated
- isolate with them any professional they need. Not only nurses and doctors, which I think you already won't find in numbers high enough to be useful, indeed in most states they are not even enough to cover normal hospitals functions in case of spikes, but also for example electricians/plumbers/gardeners/etc only for them, people who have to go shopping for them, etc
- isolate the whole family group of ALL these professional above
- create a sparse amount of covid hospitals with yet another group of medic professionals just for them so to avoid cross contamination in hospitals which is the main sanitary risk at the moment
There are already numerous documented examples of COVID-19 spreading in care homes. Nurses some times get sick. Then you have admin staff, deliveries and their drivers, visitors, other engineers brought on site like electricians or cable guys.
You only need one person to badly wash their hands or forget to wipe down their deliveries for the whole care home to become a petri dish.