Somehow related. Post-Brexit, many young liberal europeans I know suggested stripping older UK nationals of their voting rights. Just like that, you'd be amazed how far people can go with this.

To me that’s something that goes beyond brexit. It doesn’t make sense that we exclude teenagers from deciding on matters they will have to live with for 70+ years, while assuming somebody who will die soon (and was potentially exposed to decades of disinformation) has a lucid brain worth listening to.

You could also make the argument that old people have seen and lived through more, while young people are impressionable and more prone to following "fads". For example, look at how much support certain ideas had among young folks in Germany in the 1930s.

Anyway, both opposing points of view, while having some merit, are simplifications. Both old and young people should be allowed to vote, and you'll have to find a sensible cut-off at what age to start.

Of course, then it depends who actually turns out to vote, and I believe the younger folks could have been a bit more active on the day of the brexit referendum. (Of course there were also other reasons why "leave" won, including blatant misdirection and cheating by the leave campaign.)

Talking about disenfranchisement - what baffles me the most though is that UK expats living in Europe, who had a disproportionately high stake in the outcome of the referendum, were apparently not allowed to participate.

Without “apparently”, they were explicitly excluded. As we EU expats to UK were. It was a tribalistic survey that pandered to British racists for the sake of some special interests; and lo, we discovered that British racism is alive and well.

Demographics make conservative votes overwhelming. What do you propose ? We young people are excluded from decision-making for the grim future we'll have to live in. It is imo as unfair as what those young brits propose.

As opposed to locking everyone up?

In 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.

Lock up everyone for years! Nobody want to ‘live life as normal!’

Sounds better?

Stop lying. I didn't say that at all. I said it warranted further investigation, as there were studies showing its effectiveness. And the study used to discredit it had been retracted.

Every country on earth is investigating. Here is what I wrote in response to your other dead comment. Look through the sources, it's being thoroughly investigated and getting back negative results, which even if successful, wouldn't address the need for immunity:

Quickly glossing over that paper, 8,000 participants is not more than 30,000 from AstraZeneca’s recent trial. So right there, your claim about it being a larger study is gone.

Then there’s the hazard ratio. There’s a small decrease in mortality but nothing overwhelming. Loads of other studies are out there showing increases in hospitalization time, higher likelihood of requiring intubation, no decrease in viral load and of course, increased mortality. Here is a good summary of those: https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/antiviral-the...

Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t be trialing hydroxychloroquine…in fact we are! But you seem to be implying that we’re chasing after the wrong thing when in fact, we’re chasing after everything.

Long term side effects will be studied and in great detail. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of time because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Your solution requires hospitalization, ventilation and for people to continue getting infected, while infecting others because we have no immune defenses against the virus or its variants!

I’m not sure what else to say but you’re going to need a lot more than just one study to be retracted before anything you said starts to make sense.

He's saying lock them up until they can vaccinated.

I mean, they'd be locked up in a national lockdown - so the issue isn't really them being locked down or not locked down. The question is do we lock down everyone else at the same time?

We should have gone for Kamikaze nurses who bug-chase the virus early in the year and then protect the elderly. Of course with heavy compensation (basically all the stimulus that could be prevented). I think for e.g. 500k there would have been plenty of volunteers

It 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.

Sweden'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

I'm (only) 50 but have no intention of going inside a pub or restaurant or non-essential shop until vaccination is widespread.

The economy was going to take a hit whatever so pretending everything would be normal if we shipped all the old people off somewhere is just silly. In reality that strategy would have been as imperfectly implemented as the current one and the outcomes would have been similarly flawed.

The clue is the fact that no government on the planet has seriously considered it persuing it for any length of time. It does not withstand scrutiny above the level that random commentators on internet message boards can provide.

The problem is that it's not easy to determine who is vulnerable. I have a 39 yo former colleague who passed away due to the coronavirus, previously in peak athletic form with no known health problems. How would you know who to isolate?

Plus, it's not just about death, but life long life quality impairments due to tissue necrosis, especially the lungs. Sure, probably single digit percent of people will develop this, but why risk ?

Because there always will be a risk, and a cost. Protecting everybody from everything at 100% is just impossibly expensive.

Not to pile in on you, but the reality in the UK has been instead that tens of millions have had their lives impacted by hodgepodge restrictions. The economy has had trajectory altering damage. Our younger generations (aka our future and the people who will prop up our economy and nation as we get too old to and eventually leave this earth) suffer the most for something that doesn't really endanger them statistically.

We've essentially seen a year of this now. I think I would either rather pile all the money lost from protecting "democracy and freedom" into inventively locking up our vulnerable in comfort and safety (e.g. commandeering the Isle of Wight or Cornwall for all I care) OR failing that, go full authoritarian akin to China to eradicate the virus.

The UK is an island for crying out loud...

This halfway house is disastrous for everyone, and we will feel the effects of it for decades, long after most the vulnerable we're trying to protect will have passed away anyway. I'd love to believe we could pretend that we can behave like our civilised Scandinavian peers but the reality is that in the UK social trust is simply too low. During the summer and after, I knew more people breaking the rules than adhering to them. Very few people actually stick to contact tracing and even fewer places will bar you from entry for not tracing. What a joke. The UK govt has made their bed but the population are equally to blame when essentially compliance with most measures are so low.