Lockdown for all over-50s?
Plans to avert second wave ‘ageist and ill thought out’
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BORIS Johnson was told he should prioritise getting young people to follow social- distancing rules before targeting over-50s with another lockdown last night.
Officials have drawn up radical plans that could see millions of people asked to stay at home if a second wave of coronavirus infections takes hold.
Under one option, people aged between 50 and 70 would get personalised risk ratings as part of a significant widening of the shielding programme.
But, after a weekend when the young flouted distancing rules across the country, the proposals last night attracted a storm of protest. Critics
warned that they failed to recognise the important contribution over-50s make to the economy and risked stigmatising older people in the workplace.
Former government adviser Joan Bakewell said ministers needed first to tackle the problem of young people failing to socially distance.
Baroness Bakewell, who was tsar for the elderly in the last Labour government, said: ‘Certainly older people have to take care – I have been taking great care myself – but what is happening is that young people are not distancing and they are not wearing masks. The young have got to get their act together.
‘Young people assume it is over and are not distancing themselves as they should. They know they should, they have been told they should, but they cannot be bothered. That is the crux.’
The 87-year- old warned that it would be problematic to ask vast swathes of the population to stay at home again. She said: ‘It is hard, I did 115 days of isolating, and it is tough and quite a commitment. To do it again is perhaps putting us under too much pressure.’
Former Tory minister Ros Altmann branded the proposals ‘dangerous and wrong’, as she warned: ‘Age 50 is not old, it isn’t halfway through your adult life.’
She told how that the coronavirus crisis was ‘introducing into society a worrying element of ageism that we have worked very hard to try to overcome’.
Baroness Altmann said: ‘What we’re talking about here is a group in society that is being potentially singled out for different treatment just on the basis of their age.
‘It’s not that the over-50s are somehow old and therefore at risk and the under-50s are young and therefore not at risk.’
Labour peer Lord Foulkes said: ‘It is both ageist and ill-thought-out. Some under-50s have underlying health conditions, while some over 50s are key to our economy.’ Dame Esther Rantzen said people of the same age cannot be lumped together as being identical.
But the 80-year- old said she would be prepared to stay at home to prevent another lockdown for all age groups. She said: ‘Ferocious as I am in protecting older people’s rights, I think that it would be sensible to make a distinction between people in the their 20s and people like me in our 80s.
‘I don’t want people in their 20s, 30s and 40s to be restricted in what they can do because of a desire to protect me. It is too high a price for the nation, it is too high a price for our young peop le to lock them down for my sake. I will lock myself down and if the Government make me because I’m 80, so be it.’
Official figures show that almost three quarters of the 51,264 deaths in the UK involving coronavirus were people aged over 75, with much lower mortality rates
amongst those younger. According to the Office for national Statistics, just 4,895 people aged 45 to 64 have died and 7,549 aged 65 to 74, compared to 16,586 in the 75 to 84 age bracket and 21,766 aged over 85.
Housing Secretary robert Jenrick last night attempted to defuse the row as he insisted that talk about expanding the shielding programme was ‘just speculation’.
He added: ‘You would expect the Government to be considering all of the range of options that might be available.’
Mr Jenrick insisted that the proposals were not ‘being actively considered’, but failed to rule out them being adopted if there is a second wave.
He, however, denied that ministers were planning to shut down pubs to help reduce infection rates ahead of the re-opening of schools in September.