Just because you don't and a pre-existing condition doesn't mean you should take this lightly. Stay at home and stay away from people to stop it spreading to those that do.
Most of us are in the very fortunate position that we can work just as effectively from home and our jobs are not on the line during this.
Not sure if that needs to be said but I am quite convinced not everyone is realising that: If you can work from home just as effectively as from the office - it doesn't matter if clients of your company can - companies who can work 100% well in the face of crisis still can and many will go bankrupt.
If you can identify (maybe iffy) the subset of the population likely to required hospitalization, might it make sense to relax the quarantine to only that subgroup (and immediate contacts)? Building up herd immunity in the rest of the population once hospital supply lines are robust might be the best way to unwind the existing rules. With any exponential there is going to be a crunch no matter how things are done, so unwinding in risk order may be optimal.
No because if you relax the quarantine you turn a lot of people that don't have the virus right now into potential vectors for infection of new hosts once they do acquire it, which is pretty much inevitable once people start moving around again at the old rate. And once you have enough people spreading it those at risk will be more at risk than they are now.
Yes, but once the disease passes for them, they will be immune. Herd immunity is basically the only way this will pass away now, so we might as well be clever and push it on the side of the population that can take it.
EDIT: If we assume this is true and this will end when 40-50% of the population has already caught it, would it not be clever of us to make sure the 40-50% of the population that caught it is the one least affected by it? By making the measures the same for everyone you basically make sure the percentage affected will be uniformly distributed among all groups. If you make the measures distinct for each group, you tilt the odds in favour of one or another group, and might get a better outcome in the end.
IMO, now the people in power should balance several factors:
- People in need of medical assistance
- the group of people more likely to have permanent health effects from the infection
- Economic impact of measures ( this, imo, can probably cause deaths in an indirect way as well)
- population compliance to lock down measures (this will erode in time, I expect)
Ideally, the would find some social valve where they could play with the number of infected and they would direct this to the less at risk population and adjust the pressure over the medical system so it's just close to breaking, but not quite there, and directing the disease towards the least affected segment. Problem with this is the disease is not spreading linearly, so it's _very_ easy to loose this from under control. If they manage to make the status quo distanced enough so that the spread is more linear without disrupting too much the lives of normal people, and in the meantime playing with this valve for the less-at-risk population. If htis is feasible, I do nto know, but sounds like a reasonable idea.
I think this is a reasonable point of action. The problem, IMO, is that the rest of the population MUST be more stricter than ever regarding their distancing. And here comes the rub, because I, honestly, do not think this is about to happen. People are _still_ not taking this seriously, even those in the most at risk groups. Enforcing this separately would be a nightmare.
We might end up there anyway, because I think people will get exhausted with the current situation and will sill up anyways. Once the cat is out of the bag and the disease is rampaging through the population, it will be too late.
> Building up herd immunity in the rest of the population once hospital supply lines are robust might be the best way to unwind the existing rules
Have you been out in public in the USA since the "shelter in place" orders took effect in any of the affected states/cities?
This is not a quarantine, it's not an absolute containment effort. The effect is to simply slow the spread to something hopefully less than wildfire.
There will be herd immunity developing regardless of what we do. Vulnerable people are already afraid and staying home as much as possible.
Plenty of people are out going about their lives despite the shutdown. I'm in CA and went for a supply run yesterday, Home Depot was crowded with folks who seemed to be taking advantage of the time off to do home improvement projects.
Plenty of evidence of sick folks out there being careless as well. The contagion is spreading either way.
Our quarantine has thus far been socially enforced, and quite effectively I might add. Schools are closed across the entire nation, despite the fact that children are the least likely age group to even express symptoms upon contracting coronavirus, let alone die from it. If the contagion is "spreading either way", why not allow people in the lowest risk groups continue on with our lives while we help the most vulnerable groups weather the storm from the safety of their homes?
Are you aware that even with the measures you're arguing are unnecessary in place, our hospitals are fast approaching capacity and we're having PPE shortages?
The UK considered this until late last week but reversed course over the weekend when new modelling revealed that ICU admission rates in populations they had previously assumed were less vulnerable were higher than anticipated if still very small. That would mean completely overwhelming ICU capacity (like more than 20x) for weeks at a time with otherwise healthy young people who would likely survive with ICU care and die without it.
That doesn't mean it's the wrong approach in general, just the wrong approach at this point in time.
In the short term, the curve needs to be flattened at (almost) any cost, while treatment and testing capacity ramps up.
In the long term, we need to gauge the risk and isolate more selectively. There is no way around herd immunity, we can't shut down almost everything for two years or more.
Likely very iffy. Age alone isn’t enough. Possibly, the best check would be something like “can run x miles/hour for y minutes” (‘measures’ lung function relative to body demand), but even if you can find even halfway decent criteria, who’s going to do the testing? Who’s going to repeat that testing every week?
Also, I would think a significant fraction of “the population likely to require hospitalization” currently already requires care (they are in hospital, care homes, or even just have family or neighbors visiting them every few days). You can’t quarantine those [1] , and you can’t afford having a large fraction of those caregivers fall ill at the same time, either.
[1] technically, camps housing all those in the danger group and their caregivers in ‘camps’ would probably work, but I think that’s a step up from asking the entire population to stay home.
Another significant but hard to measure factor is virus load. A lot of otherwise healthy young healthcare workers are at elevated risk due to constant exposure and lots of stress.
It's also important to note that just because it doesn't kill you, doesn't mean it's harmless. Serious fevers can cause permanent lifelong organ damage and other complications regardless of if it's acutely fatal. The fatality rates also only reflect the beginning stages of this where everyone has access to a ventilator and ICU support. Once this thing really gets going in the US it's going to get ugly.
> Just because you don't and a pre-existing condition doesn't mean you should take this lightly. Stay at home and stay away from people to stop it spreading to those that do.
Correction: known pre-existing condition. Not a lot of people get annual physicals and a lot of heart conditions are asymptomatic.
I'd be interested in having a better sense as to what would constitute an underlying or pre-existing condition. Is limited to conditions which have already weakened the immune system?
Note that the most of the people in this study were 70+ years old, and I have no idea what the typical prevalence of these diseases is among 70+ year old Italians.
I haven't been able to figure out from the public statements regarding blood pressure: does the high mortality correspond to treated BP, untreated BP, or both?
I'd be curious to know if their diabetes was well controlled prior to contracting the corona virus or if it was out of control and already a cause of risk. Did the corona virus _cause_ the problem, or just make it worse?
> Il numero medio di patologie osservate in questa popolazione è di 2.7 (mediana 2, Deviazione Standard 1.6)
It seems the above poses another question; is diabetes just confounding other underlying condition(s)?
Further, if most of the patients suffered from type 2 diabetes, it would likely correlate with older age in which case higher fatality rates are to be expected.
I was unable to find this info publicly available, but diabetes being one of the "2+ underlying conditions" seems probable.
Well some of those are of course found among primarily old people, but as I understand it there are plenty of young people who are in critical condition in Italy as well.
As a type 1 diabetic I'm always a bit disappointed when diabetes is mentioned in an article without specifying the sub type. It makes me wonder if they only encountered type 2 diabetics, or other types as well.
Most people with high blood pressure also have some of those other comorbid conditions. But there are certainly cases of essential hypertension in otherwise healthy patients that have no clear cause.
No--it's saying that 75% of the dead had it, not that it was responsible for 75% of the deaths. High blood pressure is common in the elderly.
I also seriously wonder if it's actually an issue at all, or if it's the drugs used to treat it that put you at higher risk. Properly controlled high blood pressure shouldn't weaken you--but one standard category of drugs is ACE inhibitors and Covid-19 exploits a related path.
Translation from Google below. I can't paste a table, but if you scroll down you can see the full list. Looks like primarily heart conditions, hypertension, recent history of cancer, and diabetes.
I think the title should be changed to "99% of the people who have died to date from Coronavirus had other illnesses". It is irresponsible to frame this as a complete sample of deaths from this virus. In other words, it would make sense that the most vulnerable would die first.
Rather than frame it like this, it would probably be more useful to talk about whether these people differ from a typical person.
For example, about 80% of adults in the US are either overweight or obese, with some extremely obese. With that come many issues, e.g. diabetes.
So, are we talking about typical people here, many of whom (us) have some form of health issue, e.g. a 40 year old who is overweight and may have high blood pressure because of it, which is very common? Or are we talking about people we consider truly sick and fragile, e.g. a 82 year old who was hospitalised for a heart attack last year, has vitamin deficiencies in the bloodwork, and smoked for 30 years and survived cancer.
So the data would seem to suggest that the overweight 40 year old is not likely to die and is far below the median for even getting the infection (and going to the hospital.)
Keep in mind, in this time of limited doctors and equipment, Italian hospitals are forced to choose who gets treatment, and they are preferentially treating young people without preexisting conditions.
What is a "typical person"? As the article states, most of these people are 70+ years old.
It would be interesting to know the prevalence of these illnesses among the cohort of 70+ year old Italians, but that would require more searching/translating than I care to do now. But feel free have at it.
It seems to me that impact on life expectancy should be considered. For somebody who's very old, a very high mortality rate may represent a fairly small impact on life expectancy.
In the general case: a 70 year old man is expected to live another 14 years, while a 90 year old man is expected to live only another 4 years. So something that kills half of 70 year olds is depriving the 70 year old of much more life than the 90 year old.
OTOH, quite a few people in their 30s survived only after two weeks on a ventilator. That involves “fixating the patient, who will otherwise try to pull out the tube because he believes it is suffocating him”. No fun.
There's ongoing planning for how to distribute limited resources if hospitals are overwhelmed:
Fearing a critical shortage of lifesaving resources as the coronavirus spreads, Washington State is engaged in grim discussions to determine which dying patients would get priority.
Article is paywalled for me. Will they take a ventilator off and away from say an 80 year old and give it to a 30 year old? In other words will they take ventilators away or will they leave them until a person recovers or dies?
They won't start them on people younger than 60 in Italy. They will be making these decisions in Washington state, which they have been discussing and putting out in the public so we know ahead of time. All these people wanting to argue that most people dying are old are leading to one conclusion, I'll be okay, what's the big deal, I want to go out to a bar, it won't kill me, probably.
Yeah, so, you want to kill grandma and grandpa? One day you will be that old. Most people don't want people who are "old", that indefinite thing older than you, to die. But for those that don't give a shit, think practically, that the people filling up the hospital for when you get sick, or if you break your arm or get the regular flu, they will prevent you from being able to see a doctor.
You know, many people reading this have a pre-existing condition, so even if this is a reasonable way to interpret the data, it's not much encouragement for them.
Also, just because 99% of deaths come from people with pre-existing conditions doesn't mean that someone with no conditions has a 1% chance of dying. That's just bad math.
To be fair, it's not so common to make it to your seventies without developing any of these illnesses. Being old is a risk factor for death from any cause.
We need much more specific data on younger patients with pre-existing conditions. For example, hypertension or diabetes in your forties, which is less common but not that uncommon.
We need to know who to isolate if this whole social isolation situation has to to go on for several months.
This kind of idea is being abused to argue that people are way over-reacting to covad19. There are a large number of people with these existing conditions. I don't think this kind of information helps us. There are still lots of people under 50 getting it.
The sample is 70+ year old, but the conclusion is not that people in that age range are the most at risk, it's that if you have a pre-existing condition, you are at risk.
I don't think anyone is trying to say this is an overreaction. On the contrary, if you or any of your loved ones have a condition, you should be extra careful.
I feel like the Covid-19 crisis is causing people to bring out all the classic arguments for authoritarianism and present them as novel ideas generated by this context, as if there weren't centuries of history and debate attached to them.
This information is crucial, we need to know who to isolate in the long term.
If these shutdowns continue for too long, we'll be facing a bigger economic disaster than the great depression. People will turn into animals.
In contrast to that, if everybody above 70 somehow died immediately, it would be a major relief, economically speaking.
If you put two and two together, if this goes on for too long, there will be no more "civil society". You may think #boomerremover is a cruel joke. I think it's quite serious.
This information is crucial, we need to know who to isolate in the long term.
We need to discard the destructive idea that isolating some subpopulation is a viable strategy in this epidemic. There's no place to isolate people but their homes, essentially. You either isolate everyone or you're going effectively no one.
In contrast to that, if everybody above 70 somehow died immediately, it would be a major relief, economically speaking.
Yeah, these are the deluded and despicable ideas going around. No, the economic cost of dealing with the massive death of any group would be huge.
> We need to discard the destructive idea that isolating some subpopulation is a viable strategy in this epidemic.
Why? Tell me how long are you going to isolate everyone? Years? COVID-19 isn't disappearing after a month or two. It can flare up again.
> There's no place to isolate people but their homes, essentially. You either isolate everyone or you're going effectively no one.
This is a false dichotomy. You need to build herd immunity in the long run, otherwise you will have to isolate everyone indefinitely to prevent it from spreading again.
Of course herd immunity can be achieved by a vaccine, but a "generally considered safe" vaccine will likely take at least a year to materialize and then it is unclear how many people actually want to get it.
The idea that "it's just a flu" is still attractive in people's heads. People aren't good at estimating personal risk.
> Yeah, these are the deluded and despicable ideas going around. No, the economic cost of dealing with the massive death of any group would be huge.
Facts aren't "deluded or despicable". I'm just pointing it out. People over 70 generally are not economically productive, but they do cost a lot in terms of health care and social security, a lot of which is unfunded liabilities. Of course that's an uncomfortable fact, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Today this might be something that people are not comfortable pointing out, of course the ruling elite are essentially senior citizens. At some point though, the pitchforks are going to come out. That's what I'm warning you about.
I'll point out another fact: During the plague, Jews were big creditors. You can read up on what happened to them. If a crisis meets opportunity, morals go out the window. Count on it.
Why? Tell me how long are you going to isolate everyone? Years? COVID-19 isn't disappearing after a month or two. It can flare up again.
We don't have any proof that would Covids flair up again if it was suppressed. China and South Korea have surveillance that has allowed them to catch Covids cases coming from abroad and eliminate home grown cases. This is simply not the flu.
The idea that "it's just a flu" is still attractive in people's heads. People aren't good at estimating personal risk.
Me: Yeah, these are the deluded and despicable ideas going around. No, the economic cost of dealing with the massive death of any group would be huge.*
I'm just pointing it out. People over 70 generally are not economically productive, but they do cost a lot in terms of health care and social security, a lot of which is unfunded liabilities.
It doesn't matter if someone is economically productive, their death can still be extremely expensive. If enough people die together and there aren't people to remove the bodies, the cost in lost economic activity and other diseases is pretty bad.
The most important thing right now is to keep as many people as possible from getting the disease at once. Anything else is secondary.
Also, letting the disease run rampant will not result in everybody above 70 somehow dying immediately, it will result in millions of people of all ages dying. The disease is NOT exclusive to old people, and a collapsing medical system will kill far more people than just the elderly.
Compared to this, the risk to the economy, especially going by current measures (not Wuhan-style locked-in-your-home quarantine) is minimal.
I'm not talking about "right now", I'm talking about long term.
> Also, letting the disease run rampant will not result in everybody above 70 somehow dying immediately, it will result in millions of people of all ages dying.
It's a simplification, obviously. People who have a severe infection and who are not treated will die pretty much immediately, however. In Italy, where the system already collapsed and no effective treatment is possible, the vast majority is over 70, younger cases else are outliers.
Of course some younger people will also die. The "people of all ages will die" narrative is important to keep people's attention up - but it's not going to work in the long run. The younger you are, the less likely you are to die, that's a fact. The younger you are, the less risk averse you, that's another fact.
> Compared to this, the risk to the economy, especially going by current measures (not Wuhan-style locked-in-your-home quarantine) is minimal.
That entirely depends on how long these measures are in place.
High Blood Pressure is listed as one of the conditions.
100M people in the US had high blood pressure in 2018. The population was 328M. That's nearly 1/3rd of us having just one of these "serious medical conditions".
The thing is, that is Italy and arguably in the US, there are more people under 50 with serious health problems; diabetes is wide spread as just one example. I believe Italy had a much higher smoking rate someone in their 80s there could have very weak lungs, again the US profile could be different.
Headline: "COVID-19: Millennials can and are falling seriously sick from coronavirus, says new data"
I think it could be very useful if, say, we get a vaccine, but don't have near enough supply to vaccinate everyone. By knowing who is at most risk, we could target a limited supply to who is most at risk.
This would be the opposite of normal thinking, which is to vaccinate the healthy people so that the unhealthiest don't have to get vaccinated, since any vaccine has some small chance of being problematic if you've already got issues. But, in this case, if we cannot produce enough vaccine fast enough, it could be that targeting those most at risk would be the right call.
It's probably not that inaccurate, but it's incredibly misleading. Of the people in the hospital, what % are under 60? 50% is one figure I saw. And the reason this matters is that this is used to justify "I got mine and I don't care about others" (in this case 'mine' is health and youth).
One thing I've been curious about is that is the issue that these people had underlying condition, or is it that they were taking some medication(s) to treat/cure those underlying condition.
I believe it's the latter, or shall I say mostly-latter, due to the whole ACE2 receptor theory, though I have no data or evidence to back it up.
In other words, if there are two people with hypertension: One knows about it and is treating it with some medications, while the other doesn't even know about it and is hence not taking any medication - Do they both have the same risk profile?
90 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadMost of us are in the very fortunate position that we can work just as effectively from home and our jobs are not on the line during this.
If you can identify (maybe iffy) the subset of the population likely to required hospitalization, might it make sense to relax the quarantine to only that subgroup (and immediate contacts)? Building up herd immunity in the rest of the population once hospital supply lines are robust might be the best way to unwind the existing rules. With any exponential there is going to be a crunch no matter how things are done, so unwinding in risk order may be optimal.
EDIT: If we assume this is true and this will end when 40-50% of the population has already caught it, would it not be clever of us to make sure the 40-50% of the population that caught it is the one least affected by it? By making the measures the same for everyone you basically make sure the percentage affected will be uniformly distributed among all groups. If you make the measures distinct for each group, you tilt the odds in favour of one or another group, and might get a better outcome in the end.
IMO, now the people in power should balance several factors: - People in need of medical assistance - the group of people more likely to have permanent health effects from the infection - Economic impact of measures ( this, imo, can probably cause deaths in an indirect way as well) - population compliance to lock down measures (this will erode in time, I expect)
Ideally, the would find some social valve where they could play with the number of infected and they would direct this to the less at risk population and adjust the pressure over the medical system so it's just close to breaking, but not quite there, and directing the disease towards the least affected segment. Problem with this is the disease is not spreading linearly, so it's _very_ easy to loose this from under control. If they manage to make the status quo distanced enough so that the spread is more linear without disrupting too much the lives of normal people, and in the meantime playing with this valve for the less-at-risk population. If htis is feasible, I do nto know, but sounds like a reasonable idea.
We might end up there anyway, because I think people will get exhausted with the current situation and will sill up anyways. Once the cat is out of the bag and the disease is rampaging through the population, it will be too late.
Have you been out in public in the USA since the "shelter in place" orders took effect in any of the affected states/cities?
This is not a quarantine, it's not an absolute containment effort. The effect is to simply slow the spread to something hopefully less than wildfire.
There will be herd immunity developing regardless of what we do. Vulnerable people are already afraid and staying home as much as possible.
Plenty of people are out going about their lives despite the shutdown. I'm in CA and went for a supply run yesterday, Home Depot was crowded with folks who seemed to be taking advantage of the time off to do home improvement projects.
Plenty of evidence of sick folks out there being careless as well. The contagion is spreading either way.
It'd only be worse.
In the short term, the curve needs to be flattened at (almost) any cost, while treatment and testing capacity ramps up.
In the long term, we need to gauge the risk and isolate more selectively. There is no way around herd immunity, we can't shut down almost everything for two years or more.
Also, I would think a significant fraction of “the population likely to require hospitalization” currently already requires care (they are in hospital, care homes, or even just have family or neighbors visiting them every few days). You can’t quarantine those [1] , and you can’t afford having a large fraction of those caregivers fall ill at the same time, either.
[1] technically, camps housing all those in the danger group and their caregivers in ‘camps’ would probably work, but I think that’s a step up from asking the entire population to stay home.
Correction: known pre-existing condition. Not a lot of people get annual physicals and a lot of heart conditions are asymptomatic.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639920/
I'd be curious to know if their diabetes was well controlled prior to contracting the corona virus or if it was out of control and already a cause of risk. Did the corona virus _cause_ the problem, or just make it worse?
It seems the above poses another question; is diabetes just confounding other underlying condition(s)?
Further, if most of the patients suffered from type 2 diabetes, it would likely correlate with older age in which case higher fatality rates are to be expected.
I was unable to find this info publicly available, but diabetes being one of the "2+ underlying conditions" seems probable.
I also seriously wonder if it's actually an issue at all, or if it's the drugs used to treat it that put you at higher risk. Properly controlled high blood pressure shouldn't weaken you--but one standard category of drugs is ACE inhibitors and Covid-19 exploits a related path.
The original study in Italian:
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...
Translation from Google below. I can't paste a table, but if you scroll down you can see the full list. Looks like primarily heart conditions, hypertension, recent history of cancer, and diabetes.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
diseases N %
-----------------------------
Ischemic heart disease 117 33.0
Atrial fibrillation 87 24.5
Stroke 34 9.6
Hypertension 270 76.1
Diabetes mellitus 126 35.5
Dementia 24 6.8
COPD 47 13.2
Active cancer in the past 5 years 72 20.3
Chronic liver disease 11 3.1
Chronic renal failure 64 18.0
Number of pathologies
0 pathologies 3 0.8
1 pathologies 89 25.1
2 pathologies 91 25.6
3 or more pathologies 172 48.5
For example, about 80% of adults in the US are either overweight or obese, with some extremely obese. With that come many issues, e.g. diabetes.
So, are we talking about typical people here, many of whom (us) have some form of health issue, e.g. a 40 year old who is overweight and may have high blood pressure because of it, which is very common? Or are we talking about people we consider truly sick and fragile, e.g. a 82 year old who was hospitalised for a heart attack last year, has vitamin deficiencies in the bloodwork, and smoked for 30 years and survived cancer.
Median age of patients who died: 80.5 years
Median age of patients with infection: 63 years
So the data would seem to suggest that the overweight 40 year old is not likely to die and is far below the median for even getting the infection (and going to the hospital.)
But what's the likelihood of the overweight 40 year old dying without critical care because the hospital cannot provide it?
It would be interesting to know the prevalence of these illnesses among the cohort of 70+ year old Italians, but that would require more searching/translating than I care to do now. But feel free have at it.
https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-co...
Numbers from: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
In the general case: a 70 year old man is expected to live another 14 years, while a 90 year old man is expected to live only another 4 years. So something that kills half of 70 year olds is depriving the 70 year old of much more life than the 90 year old.
I wonder if anyone needing one will get a ventilator when times comes? Especially since you need it for weeks
Fearing a critical shortage of lifesaving resources as the coronavirus spreads, Washington State is engaged in grim discussions to determine which dying patients would get priority.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/coronavirus-in-seattle...
Yeah, so, you want to kill grandma and grandpa? One day you will be that old. Most people don't want people who are "old", that indefinite thing older than you, to die. But for those that don't give a shit, think practically, that the people filling up the hospital for when you get sick, or if you break your arm or get the regular flu, they will prevent you from being able to see a doctor.
Also, just because 99% of deaths come from people with pre-existing conditions doesn't mean that someone with no conditions has a 1% chance of dying. That's just bad math.
Occams razor applies
Median age of dead: 80.
We need much more specific data on younger patients with pre-existing conditions. For example, hypertension or diabetes in your forties, which is less common but not that uncommon.
We need to know who to isolate if this whole social isolation situation has to to go on for several months.
I don't think anyone is trying to say this is an overreaction. On the contrary, if you or any of your loved ones have a condition, you should be extra careful.
At the end of the report linked by other commenters (https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...) it also says that the few <40yo people who died also had existing preconditions.
If these shutdowns continue for too long, we'll be facing a bigger economic disaster than the great depression. People will turn into animals.
In contrast to that, if everybody above 70 somehow died immediately, it would be a major relief, economically speaking.
If you put two and two together, if this goes on for too long, there will be no more "civil society". You may think #boomerremover is a cruel joke. I think it's quite serious.
We need to discard the destructive idea that isolating some subpopulation is a viable strategy in this epidemic. There's no place to isolate people but their homes, essentially. You either isolate everyone or you're going effectively no one.
In contrast to that, if everybody above 70 somehow died immediately, it would be a major relief, economically speaking.
Yeah, these are the deluded and despicable ideas going around. No, the economic cost of dealing with the massive death of any group would be huge.
Why? Tell me how long are you going to isolate everyone? Years? COVID-19 isn't disappearing after a month or two. It can flare up again.
> There's no place to isolate people but their homes, essentially. You either isolate everyone or you're going effectively no one.
This is a false dichotomy. You need to build herd immunity in the long run, otherwise you will have to isolate everyone indefinitely to prevent it from spreading again.
Of course herd immunity can be achieved by a vaccine, but a "generally considered safe" vaccine will likely take at least a year to materialize and then it is unclear how many people actually want to get it.
The idea that "it's just a flu" is still attractive in people's heads. People aren't good at estimating personal risk.
> Yeah, these are the deluded and despicable ideas going around. No, the economic cost of dealing with the massive death of any group would be huge.
Facts aren't "deluded or despicable". I'm just pointing it out. People over 70 generally are not economically productive, but they do cost a lot in terms of health care and social security, a lot of which is unfunded liabilities. Of course that's an uncomfortable fact, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Today this might be something that people are not comfortable pointing out, of course the ruling elite are essentially senior citizens. At some point though, the pitchforks are going to come out. That's what I'm warning you about.
I'll point out another fact: During the plague, Jews were big creditors. You can read up on what happened to them. If a crisis meets opportunity, morals go out the window. Count on it.
We don't have any proof that would Covids flair up again if it was suppressed. China and South Korea have surveillance that has allowed them to catch Covids cases coming from abroad and eliminate home grown cases. This is simply not the flu.
The idea that "it's just a flu" is still attractive in people's heads. People aren't good at estimating personal risk.
Me: Yeah, these are the deluded and despicable ideas going around. No, the economic cost of dealing with the massive death of any group would be huge.*
I'm just pointing it out. People over 70 generally are not economically productive, but they do cost a lot in terms of health care and social security, a lot of which is unfunded liabilities.
It doesn't matter if someone is economically productive, their death can still be extremely expensive. If enough people die together and there aren't people to remove the bodies, the cost in lost economic activity and other diseases is pretty bad.
Also, letting the disease run rampant will not result in everybody above 70 somehow dying immediately, it will result in millions of people of all ages dying. The disease is NOT exclusive to old people, and a collapsing medical system will kill far more people than just the elderly.
Compared to this, the risk to the economy, especially going by current measures (not Wuhan-style locked-in-your-home quarantine) is minimal.
> Also, letting the disease run rampant will not result in everybody above 70 somehow dying immediately, it will result in millions of people of all ages dying.
It's a simplification, obviously. People who have a severe infection and who are not treated will die pretty much immediately, however. In Italy, where the system already collapsed and no effective treatment is possible, the vast majority is over 70, younger cases else are outliers.
Of course some younger people will also die. The "people of all ages will die" narrative is important to keep people's attention up - but it's not going to work in the long run. The younger you are, the less likely you are to die, that's a fact. The younger you are, the less risk averse you, that's another fact.
> Compared to this, the risk to the economy, especially going by current measures (not Wuhan-style locked-in-your-home quarantine) is minimal.
That entirely depends on how long these measures are in place.
100M people in the US had high blood pressure in 2018. The population was 328M. That's nearly 1/3rd of us having just one of these "serious medical conditions".
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/05/01/more-than-100-milli...
http://usapopulation2018.com/
> There are still lots of people under 50 getting it.
Getting it perhaps, but only 0.8% of deaths in Italy were under 50. [1]
[1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...
We can't make intelligent decisions without knowing them.
Headline: "COVID-19: Millennials can and are falling seriously sick from coronavirus, says new data"
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-millennials-can...
This would be the opposite of normal thinking, which is to vaccinate the healthy people so that the unhealthiest don't have to get vaccinated, since any vaccine has some small chance of being problematic if you've already got issues. But, in this case, if we cannot produce enough vaccine fast enough, it could be that targeting those most at risk would be the right call.
I believe it's the latter, or shall I say mostly-latter, due to the whole ACE2 receptor theory, though I have no data or evidence to back it up.
In other words, if there are two people with hypertension: One knows about it and is treating it with some medications, while the other doesn't even know about it and is hence not taking any medication - Do they both have the same risk profile?