"Keep them away from vulnerable people (who could be put into some of the unused hotels for example)"
Lock up our vulnerable and our old! Lock millions away for years! collyw wants to 'live life as normal!'
Anyway, both opposing points of view, while having some merit, are simplifications. Both old and young people should be allowed to vote, and you'll have to find a sensible cut-off at what age to start.
Of course, then it depends who actually turns out to vote, and I believe the younger folks could have been a bit more active on the day of the brexit referendum. (Of course there were also other reasons why "leave" won, including blatant misdirection and cheating by the leave campaign.)
Talking about disenfranchisement - what baffles me the most though is that UK expats living in Europe, who had a disproportionately high stake in the outcome of the referendum, were apparently not allowed to participate.
And that level of lockdown you'd need at some point anyways, because even adults well within working age require intensive care often enough when infected to overload any health system.
And yes, despite all this, if vaccines were decades out (if you expect to be unable to achieve China-grade suppression) instead of months a path like the one you advocate might be the least bad. But "vaccines decades out" a counterfactual.
Sounds better?
I mean, they'd be locked up in a national lockdown - so the issue isn't really them being locked down or not locked down. The question is do we lock down everyone else at the same time?
The economy was going to take a hit whatever so pretending everything would be normal if we shipped all the old people off somewhere is just silly. In reality that strategy would have been as imperfectly implemented as the current one and the outcomes would have been similarly flawed.
The clue is the fact that no government on the planet has seriously considered it persuing it for any length of time. It does not withstand scrutiny above the level that random commentators on internet message boards can provide.
Plus, it's not just about death, but life long life quality impairments due to tissue necrosis, especially the lungs. Sure, probably single digit percent of people will develop this, but why risk ?
We've essentially seen a year of this now. I think I would either rather pile all the money lost from protecting "democracy and freedom" into inventively locking up our vulnerable in comfort and safety (e.g. commandeering the Isle of Wight or Cornwall for all I care) OR failing that, go full authoritarian akin to China to eradicate the virus.
The UK is an island for crying out loud...
This halfway house is disastrous for everyone, and we will feel the effects of it for decades, long after most the vulnerable we're trying to protect will have passed away anyway. I'd love to believe we could pretend that we can behave like our civilised Scandinavian peers but the reality is that in the UK social trust is simply too low. During the summer and after, I knew more people breaking the rules than adhering to them. Very few people actually stick to contact tracing and even fewer places will bar you from entry for not tracing. What a joke. The UK govt has made their bed but the population are equally to blame when essentially compliance with most measures are so low.