A leading international epidemiologist has said younger people are helping to protect the elderly when they socialise and go about their normal lives.

It comes amid anger over mages of crowds of young people gathering in Galway and Cork as college lectures resume.

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Professor Martin Kulldorff, biostatistician, epidemiologist & Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, said we should be protecting the elderly while allowing the young to “live close to a normal life.”

He said young people should be allowed to socialise as normal – provided they don’t mix with vulnerable groups afterwards.

“By living their normal life and socialising they are actually helping to protect the elderly because it means we will reach herd immunity sooner,” he said.

“They are taking a small risk to themselves but helping society by doing so. The thing they should not do is first party and then go and visit their grandfather or to invite their grandmother to the parties – that is not a good idea either.

“They have to be very careful with not visiting older relatives or neighbours that are above 60 or 70 without first being tested.”

Protect the elderly

He said targeting restrictions at those that are most vulnerable to the virus would be far more effective than general lockdowns.

“Every age can be affected by COVID but the risk for mortality varies more than one thousand-fold between the oldest and the youngest among us,” he said.

“For older people, COVID-19 is a very serious disease but for children it is much less serious than the annual influenza.

“So therefor, rather than doing a general lockdown for all age groups it makes more sense from a public health perspective to increase and improve the protection of the elderly in society who really are at high risk while children and young adults live close to a normal life.”

He said he understands that the strategy could be seen as unfair to older generations but said an age-targeted approach will see less deaths in the long run.

“It is not fair, that is true,” he said. “But the disease is what it is, so I think it is the disease that is not fair.

“But it goes both ways because the older people will have to shield themselves and self-isolate to protect themselves. Maybe that is not fair to them but that is how the disease operates.

“But we can also say it is not fair for the young people either because they would be taking small risks. It is a very small risk but it is there.

“So, you can argue that it is not fair either for the old or the young but if we don’t do this then we will have higher mortality than if we do an age-targeted approach.”

Herd immunity

Professor Kulldorff noted that herd immunity is not a strategy but a fact of life – and warned that the only question is how we will get there.

“We will reach herd immunity sooner or later regardless of what strategy we employ,” he said.

“We can either reach it through a vaccine, through mass infection or a combination of the two and we have to protect the elderly and other high-risk people among us until we reach herd immunity.

“The longer that takes, the more difficult it is to protect those that need to be protected.”

Lockdown

He said universal lockdowns simply push the problem down the road.

“One can argue that we should do that until we have a vaccine,” he said. “That is a valid argument but one can also say that if we push it too much into the future then protecting the elderly and high-risk groups will be more difficult because they will have to self-isolate for much longer if we postpone the whole thing.”

He said that, while his age-targeted strategy may be in the minority when it comes to public discourse, some of the world’s leading epidemiologists agree with the approach.

“We have to do a better job of protecting the elderly for the time period it takes to reach herd immunity,” he said.

“If that takes three months that is good but if we are waiting three years because we are waiting for a vaccine or something then it is very difficult for the elderly to protect themselves that long.”

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