Over 50s shielding?

From the Guardian:

According to the Sunday Times, measures under consideration [by the UK government] include asking older people to shield once again and lockdown-like conditions for London should there be a second wave.It was claimed it could even lead to those aged between 50 and 70 given “personalised risk ratings”, in a move that would add to the 2.2 million people who were deemed most vulnerable and asked to shield themselves from society during the spring peak.

If that proposal is unlikely to see the light of day it does indicate the ever increasingly extreme nature of this ‘new normal’ and how far from any genuine normality it is. Zoe Williams in the same paper notes that ‘…it shows a poor understanding of family composition: many people in their 50s will still have teenagers and young adults living at home. Their children, unless the plan is that they also shield, should be going back to school or university, not to mention restarting the economy with their social lives – which would completely negate the extra protection afforded their parents by remaining at home. Before the crisis, one in five people aged between 50 and 64 was a carer for an elderly relative; that proportion has surely risen, now that even the elderly who were not previously housebound are considered too high risk to go out’. And then there’s ‘no consideration of the knock-on economic effect: no talk of a tailored furlough scheme, no indication of who will be able to afford to “eat out to help out”, once all the boomers are out of the picture’.

As Williams notes, it seems so unlikely that perhaps it was a deflection mechanism used by the Tories. But it points up a certain truth. The sheer vulnerability of so many in populations is such that ‘living with the virus’ seems to be almost impossible to achieve. At every turn there are paths for the virus to burn through to those who are vulnerable.