Quote:
Originally Posted by Pedestrian
Except that was never your prescription. You wanted to restrict the activities only of those you deemed more at risk than yourself and you wanted your own activities totally unrestricted including having dangerous businesses like bars open for your use.
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Bars are not “dangerous businesses”. Young people going to bars is less dangerous than young people visiting their grandparents, and less dangerous than their grandparents going shopping. That’s the point.
We can debate whether it should have been “advice”, “guidance” or something more enforceable that curtailed the activities of statistically more vulnerable individuals. None of the above was really tried, and the government here even made the stupid decision to talk about “saving Christmas” and encouraging families to gather. I suspect that in the US, where generally ample hospital and healthcare system capacity made it more a matter of personal responsibility and risk, advice or guidance would have been enough. In countries like the UK, with more constrained healthcare system capacity and a real chance of systemic “collapse”, it would have needed to be enforceable.
But if we want the policy response to “follow the science”, the rules needed to have distinguished between people more and less at risk from the virus. Otherwise the one-size-fits-all approach is inherently not protective enough of the vulnerable and too restrictive of the majority of people (to the point that they are encouraged to subvert the rules).