What's being said about an over 50s lockdown?

[ssd]

Is dh kidding me on?

We don't know many details yet. If it a voluntary that is a good plan. I am favour of any of the guidance which is voluntary and against most of it which is compulsory.

Moderate obesity roughly doubles your risk of dying from Covid-19, as does every additional 8 years of age, or a Y chromosome. So no, a slim fifty year old probably isn’t safer than a fat thirty year old, unless the thirty year old is morbidly obese or has diabetes or is male while the fifty year old is female.

I think that introducing a personal risk checker for the over fifties might be a worthwhile exercise - you could get personalised recommendations for what risk category you fit into, green for “follow all standard government guidelines”, amber for “be really rigorous about everything, don’t go to the pub and you get priority access to WFH roles” and red for “shield”. It would be good to have something independent that employers could use. At the moment employers are in a nightmare when it comes to deciding what level of risk is acceptable and who should do what job. The scientifically correct thing to do in a social vacuum might be to divide all their staff up by sex, age and disability and possibly race, and allocate jobs accordingly. But clearly that’s not viable in the real world unless they have access to an independent government risk profile which they can use with a guarantee of not being sued.

I don't think any of this will happen, certainly not in the extreme way of some if these reactions but even talking about the possibility is really damaging. It must make anyone over 50, especially anyone obese or with any other obvious issues practically unemployable. Even if in theory, employers can't discriminate, we already know how that goes

You can work out your covid age. There are examples of it online. A 50 year old woman with no health issues ( me) has a covid age of 45.

@Grottyfeet

It's not that people stop their news intake, it's that the published news is different, so the MP gets far less coverage because more pages and screens are filled with this nonsense

Exactly. And no one is really talking about the fact that the MP hasn't even had the whip withdrawn yet. The timing is a bit suspect.

your immune system and physical body is the age of your body regardless

You reach a period in middle age where your immune system ticks along nicely. I haven't had a cold in about 10 years.

BBC R4 News reporting this is not going to happen at the moment

@SmileTolerantly, do you have any data to back up your claims at all please?

@Tubeoftoothpaste

You can work out your covid age. There are examples of it online. A 50 year old woman with no health issues ( me) has a covid age of 45.

Work out your covid age here!

alama.org.uk/covid-19-medical-risk-assessment/

Will Boris Johnson be paid to shield if this comes into effect....?

I’m a bit sceptical about that Covid age, as it gives me ‘moderate’ risk age, despite the leukaemia

(I’m newly paused from shielding, and the new advice to us is more in line with the ‘high’ group, not the ‘moderate’)

The age thing comes from David Speigelhalters’ famous graph - a few months old now but I haven’t read anything which suggests it no longer holds good.
medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-covid-represent-4539118e1196

Hang on - I’ve just looked at the haematology page, and they give a different (higher) number of years to add on. And that does put me in the ‘high’ group.

Which I’m not exactly happy about, but it does make sense and is more in line with other sources I’ve read. So perhaps my initial scepticism was ill-placed

On obesity I grant you I oversimplified, because the data is much messier and includes confounders - the only thing we can say with certainty is that obesity increases your risk and the more severe the obesity the greater the risk.
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/903770/PHE_insight_Excess_weight_and_COVID-19.pdf

I note that the Alama Covid age calculator gives a slightly more optimistic risk factor of 1.3-1.6 for people with BMI of 30-39 without diabetes, as opposed to my back of the envelope figure of 2.
alama.org.uk/covid-19-medical-risk-assessment/

This is pure speculation at this point as a direct result of Melbourne.

When asked about whether new age-related measures were likely, [Robert Jenrick] told Times Radio: "This is just speculation.

"You would expect the government to be considering all of the range of options that might be available.

"That's not something that is being actively considered."

@SmileTolerantly, are you a lithe 20 something?

We are straying into something very unpleasant here.

Fun times slagging off old people, brown people, poor people and fat people.

No, I’m a marginally overweight fifty plus female with some medical problems. It’s not “slagging people off” to say they’re more at risk if they’re obese, older, male or have certain disabilities - it’s a matter of universal consensus. Whether race is a risk factor per se is still an open question.

But you’re not wrong that for employers to make free use of that information to decide who does what job is fraught with dangers - that’s exactly what I said. I was thinking in terms of a situation where an employer has some higher risk jobs, some medium risk jobs and some WFH jobs and has to allocate them between existing staff. Other posters have talked about other situations where they’re deciding who to hire and fire and that’s even messier.

Surely it should just be people in high risk category. Over 50s seems silly

@ Smile how big is the margin? This is villifying people for no good reason. Its hideous and invasive.

What next, eye colour?

Employers are caught between a rock and a hard place on this and we may need legislation to solve it. If you force an overweight teacher back into work and she dies of CV19 her family might sue the school. If you let her work from home but not a slim colleague but they both have children at home as schools may only be open half time or there is a local lockdown the slimmer one might complain of unfairness (although I think in law you can discriminate on class, weight, looks grounds but not things like race, sex, disability so employers might have to see what fits into the Equality Act 2010 discrimination categories and disability discrimination (if being very overweight counts as that) is different from the others allowing more differences)).

Xenia - you've finally caught up with why re-opening schools without mitigations is a fraught issue which has spawned many threads!

Age is just one of the risk factors.

Those who have recently been shielded were not in that category because of age (none of them, it was medical vulnerability, not age)

They no longer get any employment protection, which is causing a 'risk to my life by disease or by no money' choice for those whose employers cannot offer a Covid safe workplace. This has made headlines, but I don't think that it's an idea that has gained much traction with the public.

Perhaps because it's something that affects 'them' not 'us'?

But as we don't support the exceptionally vulnerable (of all ages) - how are we going to have a hope of extending that support to those whose level of vulnerability is so much less?

My NHS dept would lose 75% of its staff if the over 50 rule applied to the NHS.
Whoever it applies to I somehow think the NHS will be exempt.