Look at this shit on the front page of the Times. It reminds me of certain attitudes that were doing the rounds in February and March but were heard much less of once a vast amount of death piled up. And it does have aspects which make me wonder what has actually been learnt since at all, how easily people can revert to this sort of attitude.
I mean I'm calling it shit, but there are aspects in there that need not be this shit if it were all framed differently. Nobody actually knows exactly how things will unfold in the months head. But you cannot make policy and do planning based on nothing more than the hope that the shielding will be so much more effective this time around. And there is a difference between the sorts of voluntary social distancing that some older people may be managing right now, and shielding people from infection in care homes and hospitals over winter.
Its also the case that the governments original plan a that they had to abandon involved some shielding for older groups and the rest of society carrying on. There will always be pressure to adopt that sort of strategy if it can possibly be gotten away with, but in March it became clear that it would fall way too far short. If they could possibly get away with that approach this time around then they will, and its really not that hard to cover both eventualities. You just plan for winter as if the angle that article went for is just ludicrous wishful thinking that reflects a temporary change in the demographics due to parties, holidays, going out, going back to work etc, and where notable levels of infection will eventually make their way back to larger numbers in the at risk category. But then, if the hospital data never goes back up to levels that sound the alarm, you just never end up slamming on the emergency brake options of lockdown etc, and you eventually tentatively try going easier on some of the softer, localised forms of brake squeezing.
So happily I do not think someone has to make a straightforward decision about whether to embrace such a possible reality as the one imagined in that article. Otherwise I would be going nuts about dangerous idiots ruining everything. Instead what we have is a situation where policy can adapt somewhat to whatever reality unfolds in the months ahead. Which doesnt mean I think we are well prepared or will actually cope well with all possible scenarios, just that the reality should unfold before our eyes in a way which doesnt leave too much room for doubt about whether we are over or under-reacting.
If I were asked to cover this angle in an article, my main point would be that the most draconian responses should be in response to hospital data, and that yes, if people are only judging the pandemic by daily case numbers they may get the wrong idea about where we are at any particular moment in time. And that in practical terms, the amount of stuff we have reopened and the number of calls to return to the workplace means everything is already in place for the theories in the article to be tested by reality. If they tried to use these concepts to push further, for example by scaling back test & trace regimes and not paying much attention to local outbreaks when they are picked up well before any hospital data there shows disturbing signs, then I would try to resist this as strongly as possible, and at the very least until we had actually experienced some portion of winter. Exceptions to that would probably only sneak into my mind if something unexpected that changed our knowledge and expectations of this virus happened before we even got to winter.