These people aren’t dead but they are asymptotically close to it for all practical purposes. Even if things opened up tomorrow they would have nowhere to go.
However if Covid ran wild and infected 70% of the UK, and assuming no healthcare collapse, based on medium IFR figures from https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/
There would be
38,413 deaths for those age 45-64
and
3,037 deaths for those age 25-44
In addition to the 100k 65-74 year olds, and the 350k 75+
Even if you felt those were acceptable figures, how would you deal with healthcare collapse? Decide to withhold hospital treatment from over 65s?
Studies are showing Covid-19 has IFR of 0.5-1% in western world (due to age).
This means if 100% of England got infected, 0.5 to 1% would die. This is not counting that if hospitals got overwhelmed, IFR would increase.
The range (95%ile I think) for 45-65 year old was 0.24% - 0.41%, median 0.32%. The full details are on the link.
I'm not going to engage with someone over the internet about the weighing of people's quality of life years or which side of the fence I come down on there. My post was merely pointing out that extrapolating a suicide rate for 2Q 2020 to the total suicide death number was in error.
At least it’s possible. Last I checked death was impossible to mitigate.
It's not just loss of jobs/businesses/careers - loss of loved ones to COVID can be a cause of depression too. Allowing more COVID deaths could increase suicides.
You are implying that human life degrades in value as people age.
To take your view to it's logical conclusion:
We should harvest living old peoples organs to save babies.
Or look at it in a probabilistic sense. I think the actuarial table puts an 85-year-old at having about 5 years left on average. For a 25-year-old it’s more like 55. So a loss of one causes a loss of much more human life.
As I commented in a sibling. Drs need these kind of tools to know who to treat first. But governments don't (and shouldn't).
There is a moral point here about the meaning and value of human life that can't be ignored.
As a government you can (and sometimes do) reduce lives to economic value (young will pay more tax over their life time), but other times you need to assess life on a more humanistic level. If we all know we hit the age of 60 and society stops giving a fuck, then I'm going to do very different things, converging on 100% selfishness as I approach 60, as that is the logical thing to do... but a society would fall apart if we did that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
I understand it makes people squeamish, but the medical profession triages lives and decides treatments every day.
Doing something QALY negative is malpractice — and lockdowns are QALY negative because they harm the young to save the old/infirm.
You are going to have to show your work on that one. What numbers are you using?
You seem to be framing this that the opposite is QALY positive and we should not lockdown. Harm the old/infirm to "not harm" the young.
As other comment state, this is a "pick who suffers" exercise. Sadly, we can't save everyone. We can only do our best.
That isn't used by governments to decide on health or economic policy. Else we'd ban old people from hospitals (and save trillions in the process!) and in general make their lives a misery (high tax, low benefits) because their "value" would be approaching 0.
For example, it's used to prioritize people in transplant queues. The more "use" you can get out of a new organ, the more you'll be prioritized, but it's not the only decider.