Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

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Young people aren't just losing a few months of festivals. A generation of kids are losing a year (possibly more!) of schooling. Young adults are graduating into career-crippling unemployment which may haunt their lives for decades. People are getting laid off, burning through their meager life savings, losing businesses that they've worked themselves half to death to establish. Suicide rates are up. We're just beginning to see the economic and geopolitical consequences... the last great depression precipitated a world war that killed 3% of the world population.

All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy?

I have octogenarian parents who I love deeply and would prefer to see live forever. I also have a young son. I would grind up my parents and feed them to my child if that's what it took for him to thrive. And I would expect my child to do the same for his children.

Stop moralizing, this isn't "right vs wrong". It's basically picking which demographic bears the brunt of an extremely unfortunate but naturally occurring phenomenon. I'm not at all sure we picked the right one.

> All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy?

One study found the average loss of life per COVID-19 death is 11 years for men and 13 for women.

https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75

It's potentially a lot more if you let the virus get out of control. The hospitalisation rate is difficult to pin down, but could be something like 4% for people in their 40s. That proportion starts to get closer to the overall death rate if your health system is overwhelmed.

That study estimates years of life lost for people that died, not the infected population:

Among patients dying of COVID-19, there appears to be a considerable burden in terms of years of life lost

I don't think you are deliberately misusing statistics here, but this common confusion massively overstates the risk of infection in the same way that the early focus on Case Fatality Rates did. To be meaningful, those Years Of Life Lost numbers need to be multiplied by the Infection Fatality Rate.

I can't find an IFR for 75+, but the CDC currently has 1.3% for age 65+. The average 65yo has 19.1 years of life remaining (2010 stats, also from the CDC).

1.3% * 19.1 years = ~0.25 years, or about 4 months.

This is probably a conservative estimate - older people have fewer years remaining.

Look, if covid-19 actually reduced the average lifespan of the population by a decade, I'd be in a panic too. Thankfully, it doesn't.

I'm don't think I'm deliberately or accidentally misusing statistics. I think it's useful to look at it from both points of view.

You said "All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy", which gives the impression that the virus is only taking people a couple of months ahead of their natural death; this is not the case if you look at the average. People are dying with years of useful life left.

You might also like to do that calculation for the worst-case scenario of hospitals being overwhelmed, to see the much more serious situation we're trying to avoid.

> All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy?

In a "More or less" episode the insurance industry debunked that "an extra month or two": it's more like 5 years on average in a first world country.

That's some significant grand-parenting time.

Also, "flattening the curve" was not only about trying to save those old people but to not overwhelm hospitals and cemetaries. The system cannot handle so many excess deaths in so little time.

Your argument sounds like we should have let the virus go rampant and in 6 months:

1. let health workers go grazy

2. wipe out all 75+ people from the planet

Maybe the grand-children could give kisses of death to grandparents and problem is solved?

Newsflash: the world isn't steady state. What we think is 'normal' today can change, and by adapting to change we ensure our continued success and survival as a species. Entitlement as to what you feel your life should be like is a good way to be frustrated and rather than to see that a generation of kids lost a year of schooling (which isn't actually the case, most countries had only a few months interruption the bulk of which got caught by remote schooling) think about it this way: we don't get all that worked up about those countries where there are very few or poor levels of school to start with and even in the rich West 200 years ago (an eyeblink on the scale of human history) there was hardly any schooling to begin with.

The big difference this time around is that the rich West is confronted with some of their organizational and political failures.

Grinding up your parents if that's what it took for your son to thrive is a false choice, your son will thrive regardless of whether or not your grind up your parents because it isn't the end of the world to lose a year of schooling. Just work a bit harder the next year and you'll be fine.

I've watched an 8-year-old do "remote schooling". It is nonsense. We might have better luck with mature high school or university students, but the only young kids in my general vicinity receiving education are the ones whose parents can afford to hire private teachers.

It's not clear yet whether the schools here will be opened this fall. A lot of it depends on the outcome of discussions like these - and the "save lives at all costs" crowd is pushing strongly for "no". It really doesn't help to throw around terms like "survival of our species" - there is no plausible scenario where the survival of our species is threatened by Covid-19.

Well, one of my kids is an 8 year old and did 'remote schooling' and managed to keep up with the regular curriculum just fine. The big difference is in the schools, not in the kids.

It's not as simple a choice as you paint. Economic consequences can be fixed by civilised people; death cannot be fixed by anyone.

> All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy?

Extra years. There's plenty of elderly with additional risk conditions who could manage and live with them for years w/o the extra strain of a poorly understood high-impact novel infectious agent.

But the idea that vulnerability is confined to the retired is wrong. Excess death stats are also up in the 45-65 range. And I'm personally acquainted with cases 45 & under people are already looking at severe lasting health effects and have been informed of COVID attributable deaths in that age range a degree or two out from my circle. This is unsurprising at a certain breadth of infection no matter the relative difference in risks for younger demographics. Very small numbers across very large populations = large absolute impacts. Let it burn through the population without suppression measures and it's not going to look prettier.

And that includes the economic effects. They're bad. But the idea that we could have chosen not to have them is false. Once contact takes on additional risks, some large portion of people stay away from contact underlying many economic activities whether there's civil direction or not, because all transactions are still cost/benefit. The only way to stop that would have been to totally suppress knowledge of the pandemic or have crushed the disease itself from the start. Distancing measures and other civil restrictions we're left with are basically a question of how coordinated activity is, not a difference in the order of the impacts. That kind of reduction happens when people are confident they're safe and they don't present a risk to those they care about.

Also, while everyone whose career has crossed the last crash or two knows it sucks, it isn't clear the impacts move beyond economic:

https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-economy-life-e...

And while we're considering quality of life issues -- are we really saying that a year of public education is worth the tradeoff of having a parent or grandparent relationship? I think it's interesting that some of the societies that are doing much better than the West seem to have a culture of respect for the contributions elders make to their families and societies in general. I wonder if there's a connection.

And as for whether people should be moralizing: these are moral issues, which usually makes it a good time to do so. Apparently you agree, given that your own comment does. Which might even be appropriate if your moral case were the stronger one.

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