So any epidemiologist under the age of 55 who is fearful... I wouldn't trust their math skills.
Yes, senior citizens are at higher risk. That does not mean the young have to stop living. Just that you have the opportunity to be nice to senior citizens.
It could also be that those epidemiologists just know in practice what it's like to not be lucky with COVID. See you in a month with your new and shiny tracheostomy.
Am epidemiologist, FWIW.
Too many people think you can get this disease and get over it like chickenpox. We just don’t know if that’s remotely true.
Well, I'm quite confident that death is a possible answer to that question. Also quite likely: a year of horrible suffering in rehab with good-intentioned people sticking needles into you regularly before dying from mundane bacterial pneumonia.
It's not a fair tradeoff in my opionion.
People are getting poorer because they are stupid.
And also not relying on anyone over 55 in an indirect sense - those working in and managing hospitals, legal systems, physical infrastructure, schools and universities, banking, agriculture, industry and so on.
If you truly are a person like that, for you there is nothing to be concerned about - and you are probably enjoying the reaction you are getting here.
For example, in aged-care homes, the workers live in the general community, and if the virus is in the community, they get it and pass it on. Could the workers be segregated, in a bubble with the aged-care home? Their outside life would be cut off: the above social/services/supplies. Should their own families be with them in the bubble - or cut off from them? Where do you draw the line? Can it be drawn?
This same issue of transistive closure occurs for all over 55. Everyone is connected, and an epidemic follows those connections. This has been better put:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.If everybody saw it that way, we'd probably be closer to Taiwan than the shit show we are running. At least another 200,000 deaths are more or less built into the current US situation (but it will probably be worse than that). That it isn't slaughtering younger people doesn't really offset that.
My suspicion is that the reaction of a US/EU/ect... to the 'next' pandemic will be the same regardless of how bad this one turns out, simply because they will have the time (as in, years & decades) to get their policy responses in order.
There's 50 million people in poverty and their children who would benefit from Covid restrictions being lifted.
Heres actual recent CDC data showing that only 20k people have died of Covid in the almost year so far.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...