So if 100% of the USA gets it at 330 M people that amounts to:
1,650,000 deaths.
It is unlikely 100% will catch it from a single wave however.
1,650,000 deaths.
It is unlikely 100% will catch it from a single wave however.
Are we saving lives, or are people now dying in June that would have died in November anyway?
To be clear: there is absolutely no evidence for a number like that, none at all. Typical at-risk patients with comorbidity like advanced age or obesity are routinely expected to live for decades. Actual conditions with a death-in-months prognosis are extremely rare, and tend to require hospital care already. Think advanced heart failure or stage 5 cancer.
Also, that 16-20% mortality rate is surely quoted per year, meaning that the expected life expectancy would be 5+ years, not a few months!
In Sweden, which only has a voluntary lockdown, over 30% of covid19 dead come from elderly homes[0]. Swedish elderly care is highly focused on keeping the elderly independent (at home) as long as possible, so the people in elderly homes are the ones in the worst state - 20% don't even survive one month from arrival[1] (I saw another statistic that 40% don't survive 6 months, but I can't find that source, google search results are now overwhelmed with covid19 news)
That may point to an upper bound of 30% on the people dying from this that would have died "within months/a year anyway"
[0] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/kan-finnas-morkertal-over...
[1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/val2014/allt-farre-far-plats-pa-a...
The fact that a large-ish fraction of the entrants to the care homes die soon means that the people who don't die soon are going to be over-represented in the population. So if you pick a bunch of people from these homes at random, you probably (depending on the total population and total number of such deaths, which isn't cited) don't find people at the edge of death.
So I buy the upper bound, but think the actual number is likely to be much lower.
Stated more intuitively: there just aren't that many people "within months of death" at any time, and there are a lot of people dying to covid.