The author writes: "We need to shield older people and other high-risk groups until they are protected by herd immunity." I've read this sentence almost verbatim literally dozens of times over the last few months. Those who promote this meme either offer no explanation for how this can be done, or offer a hand-wavy and anemic explanation of what is really a titanic effort on an untried scale. The oldest members of our society either live with their families or are attended by medical caretakers, who are an obvious source of infection. We can't put our elderly into Bubble Boy-style hospital wards or ship them to Old People Island. If we all go back to work and school, we can't help dramatically increasing the risk to the elderly from increased social mingling and network effects.
The author offers the wan suggestion that the institutionalized elderly could be attended by a rotating cast of medical staff who are somehow certifiably safe. "Immunity passports" have been a conservative meme since the start of the epidemic, when we had zero evidential foundation for such a belief. The body of evidence for COVID immunity remains mixed. Six months in, we are starting to see cases of apparently incontrovertible reinfection. The question whether one can be immune and yet still infectious remains open. The enthusiasm for the "immunity passport" meme among a segment of commentators really feels like a spectator's desire to see some dog-eat-dog competition in the labor force.
But all this, of course, is predicated on a third meme, which is that the effects of COVID are possible death for the very old and "water off a duck's back" for everyone else. No. A number of college athletes are currently grounded with pericarditis, a risky diagnosis with an indefinite time course. Unlike our Swiss cheese understanding of practical COVID immunity, our picture of COVID complications is becoming clearer, and it includes common incidence of dangerous internal inflammation, reduced lung function, and chronic fatigue. If we're concerned about the drag on our economy, let's consider what kind of drag a chronically ill labor force will generate. This is the scenario in third-world countries, where infectious diseases like malaria and AIDS eat into labor productivity and sap the average life expectancy.
In other words, this is a dangerous complex of memes that show up in tandem and aren't particularly affected by gathering evidence. It is externally motivated and could very well endanger each of us individually.