I foresee a situation developing where for some period of time (a month or two?) after an initial lockdown to manage the rate of spread, visitors to hospitals are disallowed completely, and residents of old-age homes and nursing homes disallow visitors and don't allow their residents to leave, while the rest of us go about our lives in order to recover what's left of an economic system and society after all this.
Why?
Healthy people below 60 years old, and especially below 50 years old, generally do not have serious outcomes from this disease. But nobody has natural immunity to it. It's been stated that this infection is likely to eventually infect between 30% and 70% of the population, who would then be immune to it, at least for some unknown period of time.
So let's try to encourage the 30% - 70% that are infected, to be the 30% - 70% with the lowest risk of serious outcome, while developing herd immunity.
Discrimination by age? Yes. Discrimination by health? Yes. Discrimination by living environment? Yes. Would it suck for families? Yes. But the virus doesn't care about political correctness.
I had a long chat on the phone with my (much older) sister yesterday. They are in Florida for the winter and are scheduled to come back home (driving) at the end of March - they're watching for hints of border closure and may move the schedule up. Even if not forced ... they're figuring on going straight home and self-isolating for two weeks, and I'm not going to visit until after all this blows over. I'm in the upper range of having low risk (fiftysomething but without known co-existing conditions) - they're in a high-risk group (seventysomething, and my brother-in-law has multiple co-existing conditions).
So even if not forced to by decree ... we're essentially going to do what I described voluntarily.
www.publichealthontario.ca
www.cp24.com
