People need to be responsible for themselves though. There’s a difference between advising people that perhaps they should shield (and in truth this is what happened,) and the media talking of the shielded being “allowed” out etc.
Of course people will take their own precautions at this stage in line with what they personally feel, but at the moment there’s far too much talk of people being locked away until a vaccine is found. And what if it isn’t? What then?
The truth is that we’re all going to die of something. Sometimes some risks are greater than others, but in truth those who are vulnerable are already vulnerable to other conditions as well, and yet we don’t advise them to stay at home lest they catch any number of those conditions...
This time last year I was in hospital having almost died, twice, (and we’re talking cardiac arrests and such so having been clinically dead.) I need a heart transplant to have a long-term future, if I don’t get one of those when the time comes I will die.
I could catch COVID and die.
I could walk out tomorrow and be hit by a bus and ... die.
Or I could come through all this and die at the ripe old age of 100.
You can’t spend so much of life waiting to die that you’re not living.
I’m currently shielding at home. I haven’t seen my family or my DP, or anyone other than my seventeen year old since the 19th of March, and that doesn’t look to be about to change.
I am doing what I have to to mitigate my risk at the moment. But you know what? I didn’t come through last year to spend what healthy (relatively speaking) bit of my life I have sitting at home dreading the next thing that might kill me.
We have to stop categorising people into the “should and shouldn’t be allowed” out categories.