Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
^ Your approach works better in an advanced country where vaccines can get developed and ramped up rather quickly.
But India’s lesson teaches us that the “Florida approach” could be disastrous.
The Indian population are literally sitting ducks to this virus.
|
Florida’s approach has been like that since about last June, long before vaccines were available. Older people just needed to be careful, wear masks, avoid meeting others indoors, etc. And most importantly, segregate from the young who were around other people for work and/or socially.
The opposite approach is the British/European one, where older people went to shops and pubs and restaurants as soon as they reopened, our 70-year-old senior partners went back to the office (and promptly got Covid), and older people continued to have family and friends around to the house (maskless) throughout.
Governments created such a litany of rules about socialising and closed or restricted so many businesses (reservations only, table service only, limited capacity, etc) that people vulnerable to the virus were lulled into a false sense of security. It would have been better if they had been kept more afraid of the virus.
More generally, the fault was not acknowledging the fact that a minority of people are endangered by the virus and the majority are not. This means that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot work. The rules will be unnecessarily onerous, bordering on laughable, for most people, while being insufficiently strict for others.
For example, opening pubs to everyone with 25% capacity and only table service was the wrong approach. They were still unsafe for the elderly, but also unprofitable for the owners and not really enjoyable for the patrons. They should have been allowed to operate more normally, but with the vulnerable strongly urged* not to go at all.
* Better would be to restrict people over say 65 by rule, especially in a country with a shaky public health system facing nurse shortages and capacity constraints. We’ve argued the legality of this ad nauseam on this forum, but frankly it’s no more of an illegal overreach than much of what governments have ordered over the past 14 months.