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Comment by MrStephenJ | Hacker News Reader

You've heard of this pandemic thing going on though, right? Perhaps they should have not put an age restriction on.

Credibility goes right out the window when you say "No large gatherings! Unless they're a protest/riot for a cause we support! Or a funeral for a late supreme court justice on our side."

If you want people to follow rules, you have to be consistent in how those rules are applied.

I think it's quite a bit more than a "perhaps". The order is clearly an attempt to target a politically disfavored age bracket; it would never occur to someone without specific animus against CU-Boulder students to write such a narrow rule.

We shouldn’t be trying to prevent cases; a strategy of forcing young people inside, assuming it even worked, would increase mortality by requiring proportionally more at-risk people to get sick to reach herd immunity. But just as far as legal precedent, given this (evil) order is specifically in response to a spike in “cases” (they’re not cases they’re positive tests), it is more than justified under the reasoning used in Jacobson v Massachusetts. Unfortunately.

> We shouldn’t be trying to prevent cases;

Yes, we should.

> increase mortality by requiring proportionally more at-risk people to get sick to reach herd immunity.

This assumes that herd immunity is reached without a vaccine; the whole idea of controlling the spread is to reduce the degree to which herd immunity depends on people getting infected.

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