"In practice many vulnerable people live with younger family members or depend on them for care. "

Translation: some family settings mean its difficult to sequester all vulnerable people.

Therefore the entire society has to be locked down!!

Pretty much the dumbest excuse for the utter failure that was the lockdown mania that I've seen

Not even close, mhaze.

//Translation: some family settings mean its difficult to sequester all vulnerable people.//

The point was simply that your proposal assumes vulnerable people could be effectively isolated while the virus spread through the rest of society.

In practice that's difficult because many vulnerable people live with younger family members or depend on them for care. Once widespread transmission occurs it becomes very hard to prevent it reaching those groups.

That doesn't automatically mean "the entire society has to be locked down".

It means the targeted-protection strategy you're proposing may not have been workable in the real world.

That was one of the uncertainties governments were dealing with in early 2020.

"That doesn't automatically mean "the entire society has to be locked down"."

But that was what you were arguing....that the idea of sequestering the vulnerable was unworkable therefore lockdown was the better solution.

As I've mentioned elsewhere on these pages, I'm fully aware of how hard sequestering the vulnerable is. I had my wife going through chemo, and therefore utterly immune compromised, when the Chinese virus hit. Her specialist put it starkly. If she got covid she'd die, no possible other solution. I spent a year keeping her safe from all possible sources of infection while doing the same for my elderly father who was vulnerable due to his age. I wasn't easy but possible and successful.

But just asserting that some of the vulnerable might not have been fully sequestered therefore the entire society needed to be sequestered is rubbish.

mhaze,

I’m glad to hear you were able to keep your wife and father safe during that time. That must have been very stressful.

But the issue here isn’t whether some individuals were able to protect vulnerable family members. Many people did exactly that. The question is whether that approach could realistically have worked as a society-wide policy while allowing widespread transmission in the rest of the community.

Many vulnerable people live in aged care facilities, share households with working-age family members, or rely on carers who move between multiple households. Once transmission becomes widespread in the general community, shielding those groups becomes extremely difficult.

Pointing that out doesn’t imply that “the entire society had to be locked down”.

It simply means the targeted-protection strategy you’re proposing relied on something that may not have been achievable in practice.

That uncertainty was part of what governments were dealing with in early 2020.

"Pointing that out doesn’t imply that “the entire society had to be locked down”."

So now you're arguing that the entire society didn't need to be locked down?

Seems my work here is done.

That’s not what I argued, mhaze.

//So now you're arguing that the entire society didn't need to be locked down?//

The point is that the targeted-protection strategy you proposed assumes vulnerable people could be effectively isolated while the virus spread through the rest of the community.

Whether broader restrictions were justified or not, that assumption was one of the major uncertainties governments were dealing with in early 2020.

Back to you.