His plan was never executed, you don't know what would have happened if the government set up isolation centers and took strong efforts to get elderly into them.
The society-wide isolation orders were widely ignored precisely because most people knew they weren't at risk. An isolation plan targeted at those at risk may have been taken a lot more seriously.
Yes, I do, and given that he never even bothered to answer the question with your plan (not his), he did too. In typical libertarian fashion, he just plugged his ears and pretended he wasn't listening while praying the benevolent hand of the market would fix the glaring holes in his plan. Almost 40% of Americans are considered high risk, and very nearly zero percent of them were in the nursing homes his plan accounted for. He never planned to forcibly separate high risk people from their low risk spouses, children, or parents. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/how-man...
The society-wide isolation orders allowed elderly people and those at risk as well as those who live with them to work from home without employer retaliation, reducing spread and saving lives until vaccine availability.
The figure of 40% high risk is due to a very liberal application of the term "high risk". Half of all COVID in the US deaths are among people aged 65 or older. ~6% of deaths were among people under 50. The overwhelming majority of people were not, in fact, high risk in the sense that an infection would probably lead to death or hospitalization. 60-70% of the US population have gotten COVID, so chances are a large portion of "high risk" people have been infected.
Society wide isolation orders were widely ignored as people realized the actual risks became clear. You point out that Bhattacharya did not propose using force to isolate the elderly, yet you neglect to mention the fact that no force was used to enforce the society-wide isolation orders either. A targeted isolation order may have been more stringently adhered to, leading to lower infections among those at high risk (real high risk, not this idea that 40% of people were "high risk").
There is no need to mention that no force was used for the society-wide isolation orders. They did the job of reducing mobility and reducing spread, which means that many of the 60-70% of the US population that has gotten COVID got it after they had been vaccinated. This would not have happened if Bhattacharya's incredibly naïve plan of just closing off nursing homes had been followed.
16% of Americans are over 65. Of those who died under 65 (retirement age in the US), composing roughly 1/4 of all COVID deaths in the US, many of those were high risk (obese, diabetic, etc.) The estimate of 40% does not seem unreasonable.
> They did the job of reducing mobility and reducing spread, which means that many of the 60-70% of the US population that has gotten COVID got it after they had been vaccinated.
And for the vast majority of them, COVID would not have caused serious health issues vaccination or not.
> This would not have happened if Bhattacharya's incredibly naïve plan of just closing off nursing homes had been followed.
Again, you have zero evidence to back up this claim. Toothless society-wide lockdowns may have been even less effective than a forceful targeted lockdown. Under Bhattacharya's plan, more drastic measures (but more limited in scope) could be applied to the populations that actually stood a risk. It is baseless to say this would have had worse outcomes since this plan was never put into action.
> 16% of Americans are over 65. Of those who died under 65 (retirement age in the US), composing roughly 1/4 of all COVID deaths in the US, many of those were high risk (obese, diabetic, etc.) The estimate of 40% does not seem unreasonable.
Over 80% of COVID deaths were among people over 65. And even then, people under 70 had a mortality rate of under 5%. You can call 100% of the population "high risk" if you choose any mortality rate over 0.00% as the threshold for "high risk".
Technically isolation is for the infected and quarantine is for the healthy.
I think quarantine orders were largely followed in major cities where the risks of a run away outbreak was worse. The goal was only secondarily to reduce deaths but primarily to protect the acute medical care system from collapse under a major outbreak. “Flatten the curve” didn’t mean end the local epidemics but to reduce the rate of infection to make the rate of people needing acute medical care lower than the rate the hospital systems able to service patients. Except for a few cases we succeeded. Death is a much more exciting metric to count, but it was never our objective in the public health response. Death was mitigated with the vaccine, and secondarily by the public health orders. (Note outside of China I don’t think there has been any actual lockdown or quarantines despite people abusing that word. Advice to stay home and business closure is not a lockdown. A lockdown means you’re forcibly restricted.)
Also - asking people to wear a mask caused hysterical backlash. Can you imagine if we had set up concentration camps for the elderly?
The elderly actually have a strong survival incentive to limit exposure, unlike the bulk of the population. For instance, take the 8% non-vaccination rate among the elderly versus the 32% among non-elderly [1].
Bhattacharya's main point is that "Flatten the curve" is really "widen the curve". Reasonable to do for the at-risk population that are likely to get hospitalized and could create a shortage of hospital resources if they were infected all at once. Not so much for the vast majority of people, and especially not reasonable for children who were at minimal risk. Again, people talk about the need to reduce the load on medical without considering the fact that most non-elderly people who got covid didn't end up in the hospital.
> Note outside of China I don’t think there has been any actual lockdown or quarantines despite people abusing that word. Advice to stay home and business closure is not a lockdown. A lockdown means you’re forcibly restricted.
This is untrue, in much of Canada and the UK people were forbidden by law to go outside without good reason.
The society-wide isolation orders were widely ignored precisely because most people knew they weren't at risk. An isolation plan targeted at those at risk may have been taken a lot more seriously.