Lockdown 3.0: What it should be…
Lets first look at some facts and prevalently accepted assumptions:
- People under the age of 50 have an extremely low mortality rate (0.2%) and that too predominantly for people with cardiovascular, diabetes, hypertension and other morbid diseases.
- You will at some point during the journey end up contracting CoronaVirus and if you are under 50 with no morbid disease, you should recover with similar mortality to a dengue or chickengunya or flu or other viruses.
- Hence, if you are under 50, the reason you need to be in lockdown because you may become the carrier of the virus… isn’t this in itself a flawed logic?
- Any treatment or vaccine is may be a 9 months to a year away. At best! So, either you are planning on keeping people locked in till such time or you are just delaying the inevitable.
Here is what I propose:
- Open up the economy, the nation and stop the lockdown to allow everybody under the age of 50 to move out. Open businesses
- Implement some social distancing rules, hygiene rules, mask mandatory, gloves mandatory and other means to reduce the spread (not eliminate, reduce)
- Keep some contact businesses closed and some others restricted.
- Keep lockdown implemented for people over the age of 50 and people with morbid diseases.
- Educate and implement very strong social distancing guidelines amongst people who are on lockdown and people who are not. People living in their houses should maintain social distancing very strongly with the more susceptible people.
- Create quarantine centers where people over 50, who fear they won’t be able to maintain this social distancing (the poor crowded set) can come and stay.
- If someone over the age of 50 or with morbid diseases is found to be out during lockdown, they lose their medical privilege and treatment can be refused to them. This can be managed thru Aadhaar tracking.
- If you don’t have Aadhaar, you can’t move it. I understand there are fringes who have chosen to not take Aadhaar but we are in what is called in the freedom world as externalities. Such restrictions can be done.
- With the amount of fear government has instilled in people through the barrage of messaging over last 30 days, it will be relatively easy for people to take precautions, obey & comply.
So, the next logical question is what it gets us:
- It gets people out of this nightmare situation and gets them to take control of their lives
- It helps create a much larger pool of immune people faster. Please note there is a large share of people who contracted and became immune. In some examples like Lombardia in Italy, 70% of people who came for blood donation (meaning 100% fit were found to have antibodies, which means they are immune already)
- It gets some economic activity kickstarted in the short term and keeps life moving
Myself, as a diabetes patient, am willing to give up my medical privilege and move around. I am willing to maintain social distancing from people though.
While I am saying this, there is a larger question of natural selection of humans and evolution. We will talk about that in the next blog.
