In principle, a good idea. Isolate the old.
A few things to consider.
Who will take care of these old people? The nursing home industry with its predatory pricing will send even a millionaire to a poorhouse in no time.
The old will meet certain death. One infected caretaker will kill several of these old people. Even if you test the caretaker, she may get infected soon from going home or grocery shopping or whatever. Many of the caretakers come from the underprivileged strata of society and cannot be expected to remain uninfected. Even people from the upper strata cannot be relied upon because the infection routes are not well understood.
Welcome to the club. When man doesn't have true understanding and knowledge, man uses statistics. It's our science now.
We develop a strategy from those numbers at that time. This strategy requires cooperation and time.
If we give that cooperation and give that time, we will see if the strategy works.
Our leaders were told it could be the greatest death event in our history.
It's not whether are leaders were correct, it's whether our academics and science are correct.
Only time will tell us. And if that strategy was worth the time and sacrifice.
Does one person's health, reason enough to restrict another person's lifestyle?
So far, the virus hasn't killed as much as recreational drugs/alcohol do.
We give safe areas for drug use in our cities.
Thanks for the welcome!
I'm not even sure I understand the strategy. One thing is for sure, we aren't going to be able to afford to have everyone at home for the next year and a half until a vaccine might be developed. That's just a non debatable fact.
The genie is out of the bottle, there's no putting it back so what is our only remaining option? You protect the vulnerable as best you can, release people and let herd immunity perform it's natural duty. There's no other way that I see doing it.
So what would have been gained by our month in quarantine by releasing people today? Nothing. A hardcore, everybody-is-grounded quarantine might be right (might) in a place like NYC where the total numbers have swamped the system, but in most places it simply hasn't.
Our Covid numbers have been flat now for the past month at about 30K new cases per day. We have almost 1 million infected, and if you believe the 13 X reported cases to actually have been infected (as per the recent antibody-presence study performed in NY), that means we have only infected and then presumably made at least temporary immune one in every 25 Americans. At that rate it means another year and a half before we reach 70% herd immunity. Good luck if the US government is going to keep us going that long.
With the exception of New York metro area and Boston, I don't personally know of any hospital systems in the country being stretched. With our only reasonable option being getting as many people immune while maintaining an operational hospital system, we are way behind.
Here in New Hampshire we average about 85 cases a day. Fourteen percent of those are admitted to the hospitals. That's about 12 new patients per day. With the average stay in hospital of 10 days, that means that as thing are frozen, we are handling 120 covid cases at any given time. I estimate we have about 2500+ beds available (including normal surplus bed capacity plus state emergency temporary sites). We've had 1864 confirmed cases and even if the antibody tests are accurate we've only then had 24,300 cases reported and unreported. This past month of quarantine has bought us less than 2 percent of our population immune. Do the math for your own state and you might be surprised at how underutilized it is when it is essential for us to get back to work.
It seems that where the infections have run riot is in very large, densely packed, international cities that didn't see it coming and so imposed no restrictions or warnings while things were taking hold. For all we know, it is only under these circumstances that you might get a run away event. After all, even Los Angeles hasn't been swamped despite its size and connection to the world with the only element missing from the equation being "densely packed." Chicago, that has all the elements but only about 40% of the case load as NYC had warning before the virus had a chance to accelerate.
And we're keeping everybody in the nation locked down? Lock downs aren't just boring annoyances. Anything that goes on much longer will come with massive bankruptcies--personal and otherwise--at a rate that
will surpass anything that's come before, including the Great Depression. Ever hear that adage "most Americans live paycheck by paycheck?" I can't even imagine what would happen if we tried to sustain our current strategy.
Protecting the vulnerable while releasing the rest of the country is the only solution I see. The rest is playing games that wastes precious time while distracting us from reality.