I feel like the demonstrated effectiveness of quarantining old people is the reason you can't do that. It sounds great on paper, but it turns out that homes are staffed with lots of casual workers who work multiple jobs, and keeping covid out of them is near impossible.
Could this be addressed? Sure. Should it in future? Probably. But we don't get a whole lot of tries when there's a pandemic going around. It didn't work at first, how many attempts do you have to give it before you say "we need to solve that next time, right now we need a different solution"?
And I'm not concerned with other people's opinions. I'm concerned with their actions. If somebody follows public health guidelines, they can have whatever opinion they want. If they're out helping transmit a disease killing millions and wrecking the economy, I still don't care what their opinions are.
Everybody is aware. And many countries did try to keep everything open while protecting old people. And it worked exactly nowhere.
But once the human tragedy became apparent, once the people in charge visited one or two hospitals, once it became clear that many people, while surviving, are left disabled - well - opinions changed.
Just the side-effects of COVID are bad enough, even for young people. The scientific reports quickly squashed my idea of live vaccination in March. It seems the media mostly focuses on the deaths since these are measurable and deaths are visceral, but maybe they should focus more on the general dangers of COVID for everyone.
How feasible is complete isolation for those who are immune compromised and elderly? How is the national coverage for services relating to basic necessities and the ability to those in this group to access them?
Given that this is a highly infectious virus, a reasonable person will understand that aside from those in this at risk group, every external point of contact is an additional risk. Should they also do the same?
The point I try to make is that with how connected our societies are, the interconnected nature enables the spread to the point where a single group quarantining is ineffective.
Think of it in terms of a spreading fire. The more a fire burns nearby, the higher the chances it will spread even to an isolated area or overcome fire resistance measures.
> Screening passengers at borders or closing air or rail
hubs. Experience has shown that these actions are not effective and could have serious adverse consequences;
thus, they are not recommended.
So his solution is to not screen people and let everyone in?
> Quarantine. As experience shows, there is no basis for
recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals
So his recommendation is to let people with virus loose in the community. You really believe that?
Maybe you need to listen to people who have experience with the flu and other corona viruses instead someone with small pox experience.
Edit. I see that you were probably responding to "Are those opinions shared by the scientific community?", in which case yes you make a valid point. However it still holds that this paper was from 2006, we're in a much better position today in many places to accomplish work remotely. Many assumptions are in fact not met. I'll keep my original comment as is below:
It is immaterial that D. A. co-authored that back in 2006. It was a different time, and the measures that he is professing against have _demonstrably_ proven to be effective.
The paper gives suggestions based on many assumptions that don't hold considering the implemented rules. But they're just suggestions. Offering this paper in the face of demonstrable evidence that these measures do in fact work seems a little irrational in my perspective.
Why is simply being effective the bar for lockdowns? Lots of things are effective that aren't used because we understand that there are tradeoffs and other policies can bring similar effectiveness with less side effects. as the saying goes: "Any idiot can build a bridge. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that is just strong enough to stand given the weight it's meant to bear."
> Reasonable sensible decisions taken over months with contact tracing that actually works.
yes and Victoria's contract tracing was not good at that time and the virus was spreading in the community so the right solution after that was to have a lockdown.
Why are you so certain of your viewpoint? Other people can't have different opinions to you?