>to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life Bold statement. Should it be my mother who deserves to be

>to protect potentially as low as 1% of the population who are well past the good years of their life Bold statement. Should it be my mother who deserves to be left to die or yours? Assuming for a minute that most of those affected would be the oldest, there are plenty of people with immunocompromised systems who deserve to live just as anyone else. The other difficult issue is that an order of magnitude more people end-up in hospital, many in intensive care, for at least 2 weeks. That's an enormous amount, even if you were to spread out that effect, assuming we lift all restrictions and let the virus loose, we would be talking -at the very least- about more than a million people requiring beds at any given time, in the US alone, just for COVID-19... Imagine the economic effect of that on medical costs and the economy at large... A year-long confinement is not workable and no nation can afford it, western or otherwise. However, strong social distancing and hygiene measures, as well as travel restrictions, could/should be implemented until we have a universal solution for this.