In theory the idea would work. People being cooperative enough is where I'm skeptical. I assume anyone in the high risk group would volunteer to receive the less-dangerous strain and when the incentive of lowering risk of death is obvious. I speculate young people wouldn't volunteer unless they have a health issue placing them in the high risk group.
>I speculate young people wouldn't volunteer unless they have a health issue placing them in the high risk group.
I suspect lots of young people would happily volunteer if it meant their life could return to normal. Heck, I'd bet even for the current strain, with a ~0.1% risk of death for young people, quite a few people would volunteer to get it if it meant they could get out of lockdown.
I'm not disagreeing with that opinion. I just haven't observed young adults taking the lockdown seriously.
I personally work from home (as one of the privileged few being a programmer) and when I do go outside I take social distancing serious. My health in general isn't great although I'm not old (early 30s) and which is why I don't leave my apartment much anymore. I live in a college area and young adults are still going over to each others apartments and without practicing social distancing when going out to buy groceries. I'm in Quebec for context. I've heard it isn't much different in the USA.
Maybe the (possible) solution could work without young people on board.
>I live in a college area and young adults are still going over to each others apartments and without practicing social distancing when going out to buy groceries.
That's my point: the young adults don't want to comply with the social distancing, so if someone said "hey, if you let me infect you with this virus that has a 1/50,000 chance of killing you, you can no longer get/transmit the more dangerous strain so you don't have to social distance any more", a lot would take the offer.
The whole approach requires young people to not take the lockdown seriously. They will be the people who spread around the less dangerous strain of the virus.
Would anyone have a choice? Surely once a few people are infected it will start spreading on its own. Even if people who are infected were instructed to isolate there will be a certain level of non-compliance, particularly at scale.
That doesn't matter. The reason why everything is closed is hospital capacity. That impacts everybody. If you had a car accident you may not get all the help you need.
14% of people may need hospitalisation and you want to focus your efforts on that group. There is almost no young people there.
