Is it time to Free the healthy and shield the vulnerable

[Alex50]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52543692

we can’t stay in lockdown to protect a small minority

A few million workers ISN'T a small minority.

The "vulnerable" is a very diverse group of people including business owners, essential/key workers, managers, carers, etc etc. You can't just force them to hide behind closed doors for a year or two until there's a vaccine!

Who'd do their work?

What about senior hospital doctors/consultants with cancer, heart disease or diabetes? Can the NHS lose so much valuable skill and experience??

What about a business owner? Should they close down their business and make their staff redundant?

We need to find a "middle way" where the vulnerable are reasonably protected and can carry on their normal lives. If that means social distancing continues and is properly enforced, then it may have to be.

Agree op, and I’m surprised people are arguing semantics with you, although I imagine much is to do with them not really wanting lock down to end.

There needs to be, and is, a medical definition of the most physically vulnerable. Not a personal definition. And as a society we should protect them, everyone else should be going about their daily lives.

Because it’s the medically vulnerable who are using the capacity in the nhs, who are sadly dying in their thousands, not the healthy working age or child population. There is no way round it.

The statistics show less than thirty people under 45 have died who had no underlying conditions. Less than a hundred under 55.

Every death is tragic, but we need to balance the needs of society against the need to protect the vulnerable and the nhs. This all is sacrificed to protect the vulnerable and the nhs is not sustainable, irrelevant of how many wish it was.

You can't just force them to hide behind closed doors for a year or two until there's a vaccine!

Nor can you force the whole population to continue to hide behind their doors, which is what some wish.

I agree there has to be a balance. But the lives significantly at risk are the elderly or those with underlying conditions. We need to offer these people protection, but also to protect the nhs from being over whelmed by them.. what the answer is I don’t know, how to balance it, but we do need to find that answer. This simoly cant continue.

The vulnerable need healthy people to care for them. Often, the healthy are cared for by the vulnerable. 89% of grandparent provide childcare weekly or more often, many of the vulnerable and extremely vulnerable are of working age, the volunteer sector is dominated by older volunteers.

My worry is that the extremely vulnerable will be simply forgotten about, and there will be no political will to enable them to resume their place in society.

I worry too that the elderly will face increasing hatred if they appear in public. It's clear from social media that a large number of people believe, wrongly, that the 70+ are required to stay at home and are not allowed out for exercise or food shopping.

I fear for the people vulnerable because of mental health problems, no face to face therapy available and lack of contact with loved ones. What about their rights?
I'm BAME with asthma and work in a supermarket so I am taking risks already but I feel so sad for people suffering mental health right now.

Agree op, and I’m surprised people are arguing semantics with you, although I imagine much is to do with them not really wanting lock down to end.

Its important because the 'freed healthy people' aren't really free if they are forced back to work by bosses because they economically can't afford not to go back.

Its important because there is a mentality that we shouldn't be looking at how we can increase life expectacy, where inequality of life expectancy exists, and instead we should have some sort of status quo. Remembering that is disproportionately affecting some communities more than others (eg black people are twice as likely as their white peers AFTER adjusting for measures of age, where people live, deprivation and prior health.)

Life expectacy shouldn't be going up because people are living to an much higher age, it should be because younger people in the middle should be living to comparible ages to well off white middle class.

The article is fucked up because it normalises deaths in lower age groups which are entirely preventable.

Ah the mythical population of old and ill people readily available to sacrifice for the convenience of others, not being of course their own grandparents or parents.
It’s sadly so ironic that the people most likely to trumpet about VE Day and the bravery of those involved fighting for everybody’s freedom (not just people under 45) are quite happy to throw others to the wolves.

I'm in the vunerable group and terrified. I have asthma and just miss the shielded group, although my friend who admits she has it far more mildly than me is on it ( probably my own fault as I have a tendancy to just soldier or get steroids from my Dad who has Copd)
I'm 44 and a nursery nurse so have no way to distance, I earn minimum wage so am barely making ends meet. My partner has been made redundant due to Coronavirus
I fear I may be collateral damage.

It’s sadly so ironic that the people most likely to trumpet about VE Day and the bravery of those involved fighting for everybody’s freedom (not just people under 45) are quite happy to throw others to the wolves.

Indeed. The post war agreement and liberal ideas of human rights were all about protecting the most vulnerable in society rather than accepting the idea of 'survival of the fittest'.

We really have forgotten the lessons of the war.

There needs to be, and is, a medical definition of the most physically vulnerable. Not a personal definition. And as a society we should protect them, everyone else should be going about their daily lives.

But there are plenty of people outside that who are still vulnerable, like my DH.

We also need to accept that when we come out of lockdown we may have to reinstate it at some point if cases start rising too quickly - it's happened elsewhere.

It's very difficult to shield the vulnerable if a large number of the healthy population are infected.

This is a key point - how many of the healthy population are going to end up infected, as a result of any particular policy?

If we don't keep this number right down, then that currently small number of under 45s who have died will shoot right up (although not as high as the number of young and middle aged people with underlying conditions). The very small shielded population might be safeish if their carers are also tightly controlled (how?) and regularly tested, but not so much everyone else.

All the talk about risk for individuals from different demographics is a bit of a red herring - there's a huge risk to society and the economy from high infection and sickness rates, even if most of those people eventually recover.

The big danger of working hard to persuade people that only their low individual risk of death matters, is they come out and go out and about, but they are much less cautious about catching/spreading the virus and infection rates shoot up. The economy's recovery is immediately put under threat (and far more ordinary - not just shielded - people die).

We shouldn't exaggerate the individual risk of death to people, but we need to make it clear that it's not the only relevant risk. We're all collectively at high risk (especially economically) if the infection spreads widely. It's only when infection rates are low that businesses, the public sector, the health service and so on can keep going as normally as possible. People won't come out to spend non-essential money and support leisure businesses, for instance, if infection rates in the community are high.

To keep infections low, we need people to care about avoiding infection, not to be thinking "oh well it doesn't really matter so I don't really need to take any precautions". If we're going to improve people's confidence, it needs to come from the government persuading us we're at low risk of catching the disease (not just that if we do we probably won't die).

That can only happen if the infection rate gets very low at this stage, and if when lockdown eases they've got the testing, contact tracing, isolation and so on working extremely well. It's harder work and less appealing to some pundits, but other countries have shown it can be done.

imo, we should relax measures in stages

• but wait say another 2 weeks to see what happens to other countries who do so

Why we should wait for those guinea pigs:

1. Why assume deaths AFTER lockdown will be as low as deaths IN lockdown ?
   They could rocket
   Or maybe COVID will fade away in a hot summer - we don't know enough about it.

2. Age 45 limit is unrealistic to restart the economy and also public services - e.g. teachers
   Many managers and experienced staff are in the 45-65 age group, but they are at significantly more risk

3. Our daily new cases and deaths are still higher than others who are relaxing measures
   Better to get the pandemic more under control first.

4. The UK has not yet built up mass testing and mass contact tracing, which we need first
   PPE for carers too, as well as NHS staff

The article does forget the whole 'overwhelming the NHS all at the same time' stuff which was one of the reasons for the lockdown. So that healthy young people weren't at increased risk of dying of things that were otherwise survivable (like a car accident) because the hospitals were overwhelmed by volume of covid-19 cases.

The whole model it uses in the article assumes that there will care available to all at all times, no matter how high a potential peak of those seeking medical attention at the same time reaches. It focuses ONLY on covid-19 and not indirect causes of death.

Its crap 'science' which lives in a vacuum of theory, not in practical application in the real world.

Remove the right to stay at home in safety from the healthy and if they still won't go out force them to. Take the money away so they have to get back to work whether they like it or not.

The sooner that have all been exposed the better for the more vulnerable.

Hmm it doesn't sound so inviting that way around does it, but it's what people are demanding.

YY @MereDintofPandiculation Here is an example of the reframing of the narrative.

A few weeks ago Rebecca Mack was a NHS hero.

This week "it was her fault because she was obese"

After the stuff in the DM and on This Morning.

The statistics show less than thirty people under 45 have died who had no underlying conditions. Less than a hundred under 55.

Can you define “underlying health conditions”? How many of these people would have been classed as shielding, and how many as vulnerable? Were these life-limiting conditions or ones with which the person was expected to co-exist until their old age?

And excuse me if I’m not reassured by the statistic. Do people over 45 with any pre-existing medical condition somehow not count?

It's not just about living or dying. There is a rapidly increasing pool of people who are longterm sick with COVID- no one is counting them and no one knows why they're sick. Their numbers include many young and formerly healthy people, including some who thought they'd thrown off the virus after a week or two only to have it come back with a vengeance a few weeks down the line.

Re Rebecca Mack
I recall a thread on here where someone mentioned that she was obese. It fits in with the whole deserving/undeserving poor ethos so prevalent in some right wing circles. Essentially she should assume personal responsibility for her own death because she hadn’t lost weight rather than the fact that she was denied insufficient ppe
Sadly it fits in with the other belief that the majority dying are already on death’s door and elderly so not to worry. Ironically there was a thread a few weeks ago about what age did people consider to be old - overwhelmingly most said late
70-80s - some mentioned spritely 80 year old grandparents who would be offended to be described as elderly....I wonder if any of those ops would be quite so happy to see said grandparents be sacrificed ?

Op, don't you mean "free the healthy and lock up people you deem vulnerable indefinitely "

I don't think old people would be sacrificed. They would be kept safe until vaccine is available.

Could shielding the vulnerable extend to not trying to screw children/ their children out of their school places when everyone gets back to it?

"Kept safe" means as imprisoned as the op seems to think they are.

Can you define “underlying health conditions

Just google it. The stats are widely available. Seriously how can you not know?

*"Kept safe" means as imprisoned as the op seems to think they are
*
It all depends what view you take. From what I heard from people who have been advised to stay in home they don't feel imprisoned. Not perfect of course but these are unprecedented times.

Op, don't you mean "free the healthy and lock up people you deem vulnerable indefinitely "

As opposed to... lock up everyone, including the vulnerable, indefinitely? Would it make you feel better if you knew all your neighbours were also struggling?