kenneal - lagger wrote:LJ, you are assuming that the death rate and spread of effects will be the same in an uncontrolled (with sheilding) outbreak as we have with the current outbreak. There is no evidence whatsoever to support such an hypothesis. The facts of the lower line in Chris's graph are not necessarily the facts of the higher line.
Also in order to safely lock in your 20% of old and comorbid people you would have to isolate their carers and their families as well and probably most NHS workers and their families as well. So things aren't as simple as you would have us believe and the 20% becomes a much bigger figure.
No it does not. It is 20% of the population that become sufficiently ill with the virus to need medical intervention. That is to say, the elderly and comorbid. That is now a more or less indisputable fact despite the vague, unsubstantiated scaremongering that has been employed in a manner very reminiscent of recent history. Or, at least, it's still a fact
for the moment with the
currently dominant strain of the virus. You know... the one we are stopping 80% of the population from getting
The only thing that can vary right now is
how many of that 20% become ill as a consequence of being exposed to the virus and that is a function of how well they are shielded. As things stand, they are being shielded appallingly badly as part of a total lock down of the entire population.
What you are trying to argue is that dispensing with trying to lock down the other 80% is somehow going to make shielding the remaining 20% harder by making vague noises about how the rest of the population becoming infected, over a period of about what would be about 2 months, means that residents of care homes will be more exposed. As if the kind of in perpetuity lock-down we currently have is not already exposing them to a significant extent and over what amounts to an indeterminate time-frame to boot.
If the other 80% of the population were exposed, this would certainly require that the PPE protocols in care homes would need to be massively more stringent than they are now. But, for a
massively lower time frame. In a very short period of time, there would be a rapidly growing number of care workers who would be both recovered and immune and so provide a herd immunity buffer for residents of care homes and the same would be true with respect to the rest of the population and the elderly and comorbid more generally.
