The same logic applies in the case of naturally acquired immunity within a population.
Here's the explanation of the UK Government's policy in response to the bat flu, as provided by Guido Fawkes:
| The government’s internationally unique strategy is premised on the idea that the majority of us will inevitably get the coronavirus and for most of us it will be merely an unpleasant experience from which we will recover. Letting the healthy get it, with the more vulnerable kept physically separated from the majority, in the expectation Britons will develop herd immunity and because immune people cannot infect others. [Thus], in the long run, [there will be fewer] fatalities. |
The British Government policy reponse to COVID19 benefits from the Chinese experience. What that experience shows is that the virus-caused demand for hospital care and mortality rises sharply with age, doing so strongly over the age of 60. The UK response reflects this fact.
Thus, the authorities are allowing the infection to spread throughout the population to the point it impacts a substantial number of the elderly. At that point, the elderly will be required to go into quarantine for four months for their own protection.
Quarantining the elderly will have two effects:
(1) it will prevent mass infection of those most liable to life-threatening disease symptoms, thereby limiting both mortality and demand for hospital care;
(2) it will reduce the average number of people each infected person will infect, i.e., the reproduction rate or R_nought. The latter effect, combined with the rise in the proportion of the under-65 population who by then will have acquired immunity, will drive the reproduction rate down, hopefully below 1.0, at which point the epidemic will die out.
Perhaps Britain's current crop of bureaucrats and government advisers are smarter than the old guard:
But: Did they get the timing wrong?
Related:
Buzzfeed: The UK Only Realised "In The Last Few Days" That Its Coronavirus Strategy Would "Likely Result In Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths"
Business Insider: People over 70 in the UK will be quarantined at home for 4 months in a 'wartime' effort to tackle coronavirus
Quarantine for the over 70s! It used to be that quarantine was for those who had an infection, not those who don’t. Perhaps one might have expected such authoritarian measures from Germany or Spain, but not the UK.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting point. How authoritarian the measure will be depends on how it is implemented. If quarantine is imposed merely by persuasion, it seems like a good idea. If it means shooting quarantine-breakers, then, yes, one will be shocked.
DeleteMore broadly, though, it seems inevitable that utilitarian ethics will be imposed top-down, with Silicon Valley leading the way. Autonomous driving systems for instance will surely embody utilitarian ethics. Thus, the 100-ton autonomous semi-trailer will unhestatingly opt to wipe out the sole and innocent occupant of one vehicle, to avoid ploughng into a school bus-full of kids with a drug-addled driver who is on the wrong side of the road. Thus will the greater good be served.
Yes, there is a march towards authoritarianism in both left and right wing movements.
ReplyDeleteIt started on the left with Swedish social democracy, and similar movements in other countries, and moved on to climate change whereby one is asked to surrender much of one’s individual freedoms and democracy “to save the planet”.
On the right the problem is the “secret state” which becomes more and more powerful as time goes on. So powerful that they even tried to set up Trump and nearly succeeded.
I have just gone through a process where the Attorney General was allowed to introduce secret affidavits and testimony against me in order to stop my request for judicial review. I have no idea what these people filed in secret. Not a clue. It could have been the Kama Sutra for all I know. I suspect it was untruthful slanders (as I told the Court) designed to stop my request.
I don’t like Authoritarianism anywhere – If one allows it, it’s the thin end of the wedge that leads to secret proceedings, and secret trials, and concentration camps.