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They are considering the same strategy in Belgium, but with even bigger gap. It seems that it’s the only way to achieve at least some herd immunity before summe
by f6v 6y ago
They are considering the same strategy in Belgium, but with even bigger gap. It seems that it’s the only way to achieve at least some herd immunity before summer.
- collyw 6y ago> that it’s the only way to achieve at least some herd immunity before summer. They could have let young healthy people live their lives as normal, as the virus barely affects them. Keep them away from vulnerable people (who could be put into some of the unused hotels for example) and viola, you have decent levels of herd immunity without the expense and destruction of civil liberties. Instead we drag this thing out as long as possible.
- jackcodes 6y agoI think you’re significantly over-estimating the ease of keeping them away from older people.
- colordrops 6y agoTrillions have been spent in the US on bailouts. You could have paid for full time care for every single vulnerable person for a year at that cost, and left everyone else to live normally.
- seszett 6y agoIt's not just a question of paying for the care for vulnerable persons. But young people sometimes also want to see their parents at least a few times a year, even if they aren't vulnerable and can care for themselves.
- colordrops 6y agoWouldn't having a nurse or some other full time trained person present be more effective than anything at helping keep "young people" from getting too close? And if these "young people" are out of control, how does lockdown help anyway?
- riffraff 6y agopeople who are affected are not just 90yo that need a nurse, there's a ton of people in their 60s and 70s (>2% chance of death by covid) who live a normal life and don't want to be locked in a room and cut from everyone else. The lockdown helps because it protects people who don't care too, by relying on those who do _just a bit_. Sadly, the option of segregating all at-risk people is not reasonably feasible.
- throwawaysea 6y agoThe infection fatality rate for those aged 50-69 is NOT 2%. It is 0.5% per https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... As for those who don’t want to be locked in a room - sounds like they want to have it both ways - just the right amount of risk reduction and a sooner path to living their lives freely. But why is their desire for a normal life more important than others’ desire? Why should others have to give up their freedoms and endure an extended lockdown to enable them, instead of living their lives freely now?
- ptaipale 6y agoEven 0.5 % fatality rate is huge, in my opinion. For polio, only 0.5 % of those who contracted polio had nervous system symptoms. Of this small minority that developed muscle weakness, about 2 to 5 percent of children and 15 to 30 percent of adults died. Still, it was a frightening disease, until it was eradicated by vaccines (except where it wasn't: now that covid has brought the world's focus back to vaccines, we should do something about that, too.)
- riffraff 6y agobut I wrote "in their 60s and 70s", replacing people 50-59 with 70-79 will obviously give you different results. I agree with you, people want to have it both ways and it's easy to get upset with them, but that's how the world is, and if the healthcare system gets overwhelmed because of people who don't care everyone else still suffers.
- raverbashing 6y agoAnd who's supposed to take care of the elderly? Oh that's right, young people Great plan
- colordrops 6y agoI don't understand your response. I'm suggesting trained professionals e.g. nurses, not random teenagers.
- laumars 6y agoThere are already numerous documented examples of COVID-19 spreading in care homes. Nurses some times get sick. Then you have admin staff, deliveries and their drivers, visitors, other engineers brought on site like electricians or cable guys. You only need one person to badly wash their hands or forget to wipe down their deliveries for the whole care home to become a petri dish.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoThere was a recent case of 3 deaths occuring in a nursing home in the UK after an infected Santa came to visit.
- raverbashing 6y agoAnd 16 deaths in a similar case in Belgium
- yulaow 6y agoIn Italy those are exactly the super-spreaders who caused a spike of death in most ISOLATED caring homes in which only they could enter. For your plan to remotely work you would have to: - totally isolate the people over an age limit that you want to keep out of society, assuming they don't are still working and/or have the money to stay isolated - isolate with them any professional they need. Not only nurses and doctors, which I think you already won't find in numbers high enough to be useful, indeed in most states they are not even enough to cover normal hospitals functions in case of spikes, but also for example electricians/plumbers/gardeners/etc only for them, people who have to go shopping for them, etc - isolate the whole family group of ALL these professional above - create a sparse amount of covid hospitals with yet another group of medic professionals just for them so to avoid cross contamination in hospitals which is the main sanitary risk at the moment
- refactor_master 6y agoAnd how would this presumably completely non-disease-transmissible full time care manifest itself? With doctors and nurses that also have kids, and social lives, and thus a chance to transmit disease.
- colordrops 6y agoPresumably medical professionals would be tested frequently and would a much higher sterilization standards and training than the average person. They'd of course still use n95 masks and perhaps even full body suits when they are present.
- hummusman 6y agoWe should gauge our society on how we treat our most vulnerable people, and if this is how people want to shape our society then stop the train and let me get off. Locking up vulnerable people in quasi-concentration camps staffed by hazmat suit wearing doctors administering ‘care’ in the most basic and cruel manner is no way to treat any human being live, let alone a group of lab rats. I’d challenge anyone advocating this nonsense to lock themselves away for six months with only the most basic/essential of interactions and see how they get on. This lack of empathy or any sense of understanding of human nature and sociability is absolutely absurd.
- tomp 6y agoI don’t really see what you’re objecting to. Locking up a part of the population is strictly better than locking up the whole population. You could even make it optional! “High-risk individuals welcome to go to protection centres”
- throwawaysea 6y agoYou’re deriding this approach as “nonsense” but your reasoning seems illogical to me. And washing it with words like “empathy” and “sociability” doesn’t help, since it comes off as the worst kind of virtue signaling, employing shaming disguised as a moral superiority. I agree being locked down would be tough. But that’s what we are asking EVERYONE to do right now. Why should the elderly or vulnerable not have to bear the burden of THEIR evaluation of the risks, by being quarantined, instead of subjecting the entire rest of the world to lockdowns just so they can have a better (sooner) path to normal for themselves? That just looks to me like a selfish imposition on everyone else. I don’t understand what point you’re making about challenging people to lock themselves away for six months with only basic interactions. That’s the current situation we’re in. And yes it is especially bad for the young, who need socialization, education, play time, and even simply to see faces/emotions without a mask. We are sacrificing their well being and future to do what - give the elderly a faster path out of their own quarantine or a few more years towards the end of their life? It’s a bad trade off and is highly unjust towards the young. Lastly, we should gauge a society based on how we treat people’s fundamental rights, especially in a difficult situation. A society that gives up those rights easily and advocates for coercive governmental controls is not a great society.
- quattrofan 6y agoNot this nonsense again! The problem is young people can and do mix with older generations and infect them. It's why no country has pushed this strategy.
- vesinisa 6y agoSweden tried this with catastrophic end results. It's practically impossible to shield the vulnerable population from a highly contagious disease that is rampant in the non-vulnerable population - someone after all needs to tend for the vulnerable. Swedish health system basically collapsed under the weight and after an order of magnitude more deaths than in comparable neighboring countries they are now taking to restrictions as well. I am sure no one takes joy in "destruction of civil liberties", but we have to balance here some fundamental rights, like the right to life, with other fundamental rights such as freedom of movement and economic rights. Also, I have to point out a glaring cognitive dissonance here. You basically just said: "let's put vulnerable people into unused hotels so we can safeguard civil liberties". Did you mean: "let's put vulnerable people into unused hotels so we can safeguard civil liberties of young people"?
- jsnell 6y ago> several orders of magnitude more deaths than in comparable neighboring countries One order of magnitude, not several.
- mahkeiro 6y agoAnd not really worst that the rest of Europe...
- evgen 6y agoJust dramatically worse than their comparable neighbors who, unlike the rest of Europe, share the same cultural/demographic/socio-economic factors. Nothing screams denialist more than people trying to hand-wave the Swedish failure away by ignoring neighbors and comparing them to some other, bigger, EU covid clusterfuck.
- roenxi 6y agoAccording to [0] Sweden has better deaths per capita than the US, UK, Spain and Italy. We still have no data about what the longer term effects of all these business closures will be, because the pandemic is ongoing. And at the time the decisions were made it was wishful thinking that a vaccine would be almost upon us by now. This Swedish "failure" is not yet manifest. They are an apparently weak performer, but by no means outside the pack. And the better performers in the pack are suspect - India and China may as well be several different countries packed together by population. Their numbers are a bit unrealistic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
- elorant 6y agoThis assumes that old people live isolated. In many countries this is hardly the case. If you take Greece or Italy for example, the elder live with their kids, and in many cases their grandchildren all together.
- glutamate 6y ago"vulnerable" = 1/3 of the population.
- laumars 6y agoI know of a few young and healthy people who have ended up in hospital due to COVID and still have longer term lunge damage. This whole “it only affects the elderly” meme needs to die. They’re just in a greater risk category of death but there are so many variables at play, such as the viral load. And if you’re allowing a virus to run rampant in the hope of gaining herd immunity then there’s a real risk that people will take in larger viral loads. Also, natural immunity is only estimated to last around 2 or 3 months and offers no protection against other strains (some of which appear (statistically speaking) to affect younger folk more severely than the original SARA-CoV-2 strain).
- emn13 6y agoThe latest evidence I know of of the new UK variant claims there is no evidence of increased re-infectivity: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/948152/Technical_Briefing_VOC202012-2_Briefing_2_FINAL.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... I've also heard conflicting data on the natural immunity duration - many sources claim at least 3 months of protection, but I can't quickly find any that suggest immunity lasts no more than 3 months. Indirect evidence suggests immunity lasts longer, namely the persistently low re-infection rate - since the first wave is so long ago, you'd assume there was more reinfection by now if immunity lasted just 3 months, right? But maybe I'm reading this wrong; do you have a citation to back this surprising estimate?
- sgt101 6y agoI think that this is absence of evidence being taken as evidence of absence. It's pretty hard to bang the table and insist that natural immunity lasts for years when there are no examples of anyone being immune to this for years (yet). I think that professionals would fight shy of asserting this because they are exposing themselves to professional opprobrium (potentially) and they have lots of other things to do now and they are probable concerned that the message will be hijacked to justify not wearing masks/hugging old people/ having big parties/collapsing the healthcare system and killing lots of people. After immunization and when the infection rate goes low again I expect that stronger claims will get made.
- chimprich 6y ago> Keep them away from vulnerable people (who could be put into some of the unused hotels for example) Depending on how you define it, there's something like 15 million vulnerable people in the UK. There's fewer than 1 million hotel rooms. What happens to school-age children of people who are vulnerable? Do they have to isolate in the hotel rooms too? What happens to the carers of some of these vulnerable people? Do they have to isolate? What about their families? People who are "vulnerable" need by the far the most medical care. How do you do that safely? We can't avoid people picking up infections in hospitals at the moment. Surely it would be far worse if we let the virus go wild? Wouldn't having lots of vulnerable people who need lots of personal care packed into hotels be at high risk for the virus spreading between them? Isn't that the problem we currently have with care homes? As soon as you start looking into this as a solution it looks far easier to try to suppress the virus across the entire population.
- ulfw 6y agoWhat a terrible terrible thing to say. Not expecting people like you on Hackernews. "Keep them away from vulnerable people (who could be put into some of the unused hotels for example)" Lock up our vulnerable and our old! Lock millions away for years! collyw wants to 'live life as normal!'
- djbebs 6y agoAs opposed to locking everyone up?
- usrusr 6y agoIn an unconstrained high incidence situation you need much, much harder isolation to reach a level of individual safety comparable to that of a lockdown that barely achieves an R value of roughly one. More like a space station than like a hotel. And that level of lockdown you'd need at some point anyways, because even adults well within working age require intensive care often enough when infected to overload any health system. And yes, despite all this, if vaccines were decades out (if you expect to be unable to achieve China-grade suppression) instead of months a path like the one you advocate might be the least bad. But "vaccines decades out" a counterfactual.
- Veen 6y agoIt seems an eminently sensible suggestion to me. Invest heavily in shielding and treatment for the vulnerable and vaccine development, while allowing the non-vulnerable to live their lives and keep the economy afloat.
- jamienicol 6y agoSweden's economy was also hit hard. Like many young people I don't want to catch covid. I'm not "shielding", but even if there were no restrictions in place I'd still be working from home and contributing far less to the economy
- andybak 6y ago
- robertlagrant 6y agoUnused hotels staffed by whom?
- m4rtink 6y agoIt should be the other way around actually - unused hotels for people who might be infected, so they can stay away from their family and contacts before it's safe again to go near them. Often there is nothing like this available and whole families get needlesly infected when individual family members get infected as they don't really have anywhere to go to effectively isolate themselves.
- xbmcuser 6y agoYeah give the virus the chance to mutate so that vaccines are ineffective or it starts killing young people. Most people in favour of keeping everything open ignore the fact the virus mutates so more people are infected the larger the chances of a deadlier strain or a virus against which the current vaccines are ineffective.
- sharken 6y agoThe virus will mutate, that has already been proven, so we might think that we can control the mutation but in reality we can't. We can speculate all day long if the virus will change into something more lethal, but that is hardly beneficial to anyone. Better to let the vaccine roll out and get our lives back instead of living in fear the next decade or so.
- f6v 6y agoFor crying out loud, nobody likes being at home for more than a year, but how can you make such claims? As of now, there's no way of telling whether there're no long-term consequences for young people. We're completely in the dark and you're suggesting taking the chances.
- stordoff 6y agoDoes a broader/faster spread increase the likelihood of significant mutations (I've seen this suggested, but I'm unclear if it was by a reliable source)? If so, this seems like it may be a risky strategy, as it may, for instance, challenge your assumptions (that it "barely effects" young healthy people) or nullify your vaccine progress.
- simonbarker87 6y ago> who could be put into some of the unused hotels Wowzers!!!! That’s the most insane idea I’ve heard in 2020. Let’s take a load of people from their homes and pen them all in together, removed from society whilst everyone else goes about their normal lives? You would have rioting on both sides, from those penned in and the relatives of those people on the outside.
- collyw 6y agoHow is it crazier than locking everyone in their homes except for supermarket visits, which is what happened here in Spain?
- pelasaco 6y agofor me the most sad part is that, at least in Germany, in my opinion, part of the Seniors are not really caring about masks (mask under the nose == no mask). Sad to go to the supermarket and see them really not respecting the necessary distance or using the mask wrongly just because they don't want to use it.
- tinus_hn 6y agoHere’s something that might enlighten you: many old people don’t want to be alone for a year to avoid a chance of dying. Many old people would take that risk.
- pelasaco 6y agoI think you didn't read my comment. I'm not talking about social isolation, but to use the mask properly - covering mouth and nose (at the same time) - and keep the recommended 1.5 m distance while in the supermarket
- hef19898 6y agoWould still beat cruise ships, wouldn't it?
- NicoJuicy 6y agoBelgium is going to investigate smaller doses to go faster too. It looks really promising, but investigation is required.
- bbarnett 6y agoWe tried the same thing, in Canada, with the yellow fever vaccine. There were shortages about 6? 7? years ago, and 1/5th dosage was consider a stop-gap, by conveying some immunity. (And, better outcomes overall, too) Not sure how all of that wound up, but: https://www.who.int/emergencies/yellow-fever/mediacentre/qa-fractional-dosing/en/ https://www.who.int/emergencies/yellow-fever/mediacentre/qa-... edit: For clarity, there wasn't an outbreak in Canada, but just shortages if you wanted to travel, and needed the vaccine.
- zamalek 6y ago> just shortages I had the yellow fever vaccine last year in America. I received an, otherwise identical, Europe-manufactured vaccine instead of an American one because the shortage is on-going.
- bbarnett 6y agoSupposedly identical, yet the European one (French?) wasn't approved for use in Canada yet. Your response made me think back to my research a few years back. Mostly, because I am surprised that there are STILL shortages! For more than half a decade?! Found this: https://www.ashp.org/Drug-Shortages/Current-Shortages/Drug-Shortage-Detail.aspx?id=197&loginreturnUrl=SSOCheckOnly https://www.ashp.org/Drug-Shortages/Current-Shortages/Drug-S... Quote: Sanofi Pasteur has YF-Vax multi-dose vials and single dose vials on back order and the company estimates product will be available in 2021.[1] Sanofi Pasteur has worked with FDA to make another vaccine, Stamaril, available in the US under an investigational new drug program. Stamaril is yellow fever vaccine manufactured by Sanofi Pasteur in France. It is not licensed in the US. This, I recall. I also recall some more research, which I cannot find now, in that there were different production methods between the two vaccines. Hence, the lack of quick approval. Yet Yellow Fever is crazy spreadable! And still the vaccine is not fully approved in the US/Canada?! I recall reading a report, where one person with yellow fever was briefly in an airport lounge. 20 minutes later, a few people passed through, and most caught it! Just... it makes COVID look like a joke, yet here governments are dragging their heels over approvals due to production methods over the same strains? And those production methods / that company has been making and administering that version for decades? To hundreds of millions? It really makes you think a bit about COVID approvals. Talk about a change of heart.
- scrollaway 6y ago(I am a Belgium resident) I think the only reason they're considering this in Belgium right now is because they are unprepared in the extreme. They have frankly pissed away their time instead of actually preparing for the vaccine, the past nine months. The current vaccination rollout plan leaves healthcare workers unvaccinated until march. HEALTHCARE WORKERS. https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/147133/covid-19-vaccinations-in-nursing-homes-from-monday-health-workers-in-march/ https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/147133/c... There's been some pretty severe backlash to that, and rightfully so (I don't know of any other country that isn't vaccinating its health workers in the very first phase alongside senior citizens). I ran some numbers the other day and if you're distributing the vaccines exclusively via the 40-ish Belgian hospitals that can store the Pfizer one (and only 6 in Brussels), then there is no way to achieve herd immunity before end of 2020. The only real solution to that is to allow for more widespread distribution via pharmacies. (Yes, medium-term storage is an issue, but AIUI the Pfizer vaccines can still move around after thawing for some time so short term redistribution is possible if you've prepared for it). So they're trying whatever they can to compress the timeline. It's not necessarily a bad decision, but it's a workaround to a worse one.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThis is happening in the US as well, and now they're acting shell shocked at receiving 2-3 million doses because that is actually indeed a lot of doses which means you need lots of trained people on how to handle them and inject them. This is gonna take a long time. Hopefully Biden will scramble more people and resources. Depending on corporations as the sole distributors is a bad, bad idea.
- f6v 6y agoYes, and all the parties from the beginning of summer till days before new lockdown. I don’t know how it goes in other countries, unfortunately common sense is anything but common. Also I’ve read that “Belgium accounts for 25% of Europe’s biotech”. I wonder why there’s no domestic vaccine yet given such R&D capacity.