Why can’t we shield the vulnerable?

[Calledyoulastnightfromglasgow]

Can anyone tell me why this wouldn’t work?

It’s been dismissed out of hand by the government as apparently it would still spread. As far as I can see, it’s spreading anyway - maybe restrictions only work for so long and we have non compliance?

But can’t we throw a pile of money at the issue (which would still be less than we currently are spending). Segregated medical appointments/dental etc. Home delivery o iu for shielders. Basically what we did in March but to the vulnerable or vulnerable households.

My mum is elderly and is pretty much shielding until a vaccine anyway. It’s dismal. The sooner the less vulnerable of us get it, then the sooner we can achieve some kind of community immunity.

We would have covid hospitals only - we would actually use them. We would still have restrictions so it didn’t spread so quickly but we wouldn’t paralyse whole sectors.

I appreciate long covid is a thing - but so is most chronic fatigue after a virus (I have had it).

The real issue might be households where the elderly lived with the young. Or the highly vulnerable. My friend is in this category and has spent months shielding. It’s dismal.

If we had adopted this strategy slowly from April we could have avoided hitting flu season.

People go on about antibodies but T cell immunity is repeatedly ignored and the cases where people demonstrate symptoms twice are something like five.

I just can’t believe we are going to save more lives with the current strategy compared to a change of tactic. Thousands will die through other causes as it is.

In the absolute worst case of no vaccine, no treatment ,no cheap rapid tests, and no long term immunity, then we will have to scale up our health service to cope. That would take about 5 years I would guess.

It would be very difficult to keep us all locked down for 5 years though...

Hopefully it won't come to that.

@sonnenscheins

Quite simply, there'd be so many people who were either dead or ill

I think it depends on how many 'so many' people would actually be.

How many do you think is ok?

FFS Vulnerable doesn’t mean elderly or living alone , we are people working , raising families , caring for our parents etc - I’m starting to think people would actually accept us being shipped to glorified concentration camps so they can go to the pub etc

@sonnenscheins oh well. Not what the study says, but It's a new virus, there's going to be new and prob differing info for a while yet. One thing is for certain, we do not know enough about it to gamble on herd immunity.

@Mrsbyers thank you.

Not all vulnerable people are elderly (although on MN anyone over 50 is seen as fair game to be kicked aside "for the children"). Vulnerable people are in the work force, work as volunteers, are part of our community.

How many more times does this need to be said?

The false promise of herd immunity - an article from Nature. Nature is a top scientific journal.

" “Surrendering to the virus” is not a defensible plan, says Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Such an approach would lead to a catastrophic loss of human lives without necessarily speeding up society’s return to normal, he says. “We have never successfully been able to do it before, and it will lead to unacceptable and unnecessary untold human death and suffering.”...

"Sweden is hardly a model of success — statistics from Johns Hopkins University show the country has seen more than ten times the number of COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people seen in neighbouring Norway (58.12 per 100,000, compared with 5.23 per 100,000 in Norway). Sweden’s case fatality rate, which is based on the number of known infections, is also at least three times those of Norway and nearby Denmark."...

"People are understandably tired and frustrated with imposed measures such as social distancing and shutdowns to control the spread of COVID-19, but until there is a vaccine, these are some of the best tools around. “It is not inevitable that we all have to get this infection,” D’Souza says. “There are a lot of reasons to be very hopeful. If we can continue risk-mitigation approaches until we have an effective vaccine, we can absolutely save lives.” "

Because when you say shield the vulnerable what you actually mean is lock people out of society completely so that you don’t experience any loss of freedom at all. It’s monumentally selfish, utterly offensive and quite honestly you can just fuck of with your othering and discrimination

This.

@MissMarplesGlove

Because when you say shield the vulnerable what you actually mean is lock people out of society completely so that you don’t experience any loss of freedom at all. It’s monumentally selfish, utterly offensive and quite honestly you can just fuck of with your othering and discrimination

This.

Agreed.

It’s dressing selfish wants up as being for the greater good to appease the conscience. Othering sectors of society and calling it for the greater good is never ok.

1,400 deaths announced in the last week. That’s too many for me.

Ooof that's higher than at the start of the pandemic ....

According to this article www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/27/second-covid-wave-forecast-deadly-first/ more deaths are predicted this winter than in the first wave.

That's a cheery article to start the day with!!

OP - any chance of any ideas from you at all about who would count as vulnerable (I gave some ideas in previous post) and what you mean by protect.

Not a full policy - just some idea of what you actually mean. Without some info, there's no way to have a discussion.

AFAIK it's been rejected as too heartless by all sides, and as unworkable by a strong consesnsus of mainstream epidemiologists.

Because short of locking away the vulnerable, and enough workers to provide parallel 'clean' services for a reasonable life, it simply won't work. Short term, when you can go without, is completely different to months especially coming shortly after months of national lockdown or tier restrictions (has your dentist got through their backlog yet?)

And it could be utter appalling for care home residents. Staff wouid have to live in (or prove their isolation somehow) and forego leisure activities on their days off, which might reduce the numbers willing to work there. And visitors wouid remain banned, unless they could prove isolation. Because that's what effective protection n of the vulnerable within wouid mean.

I prefer an approach which reduces the level of transmission generally, for that way more can be open (and potentially profitable) and nearly everyone can participate.