Comment by _Understated_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Understated_ | Hacker News Reader

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That's not an argument...

Healthy is subjective but when you say it like that then, yes, everyone has something.

However, there are a bunch of things that will greatly increase your chances of dying from COVID: diabetes, obesity, cancer, immune-related illnesses so this is what I am referring to. It's fair to say that people with one or more of those (not an exhaustive list) are "unhealthy".

So, it's not misleading: it's people who are vulnerable either due to age or health reasons that are at risk of dying, no one else.

It was even raised by an MP recently and he asked Boris Johnston why we're getting locked down when only 400 or so people with no underlying conditions have died... everyone else had underlying conditions related to poor health that made them susceptible so they should have been locked down and the rest of us left to get on with things.

> everyone else had underlying conditions related to poor health that made them susceptible so they should have been locked down and the rest of us left to get on with things.

This seems wildly expensive and impractical. Who's going to take care of all those people? Where are you going to house them (many of them live with people without those conditions)? Do you know how many people have diabetes, just to grab the first item off your list?

Do you think it's more expensive than the way we do it now?

I'd bet so. If it's even possible.

34.2 million people in the US are estimated have diabetes and you're proposing housing all of them (and a bunch of other people) in isolation for a year or two while everyone else goes about their business.

That's a lot of housing to find somewhere, food to provide, etc. Now try to do it in, say, six months.

At it's peak, unemployment from COVID shutdowns in the US looks like they were around 20-30M last summer. So in terms of making sure those people still have income, the number of people isn't too dissimilar, but that number has declined and we also didn't have to find new, isolated, housing, food, and other services for that group.

It's also a lot of people suddenly pulled out of their existing jobs and out of the regular in-person retail market, which means you're still not going to avoid some of the shocks we're seeing anyway.

You are assuming that the 34 million with diabetes are in the workforce. Based on the age distributions of people with diabetes, most are probably retired or disabled.

A fairly large slice of under-70s have diabetes, obesity or cancer.

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