No Covid 19 is not an old person problem | Hacker News Reader

No Covid 19 is not an old person problem

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4 pointszuhayeer9 comments

A blog post opening with a painting called "the triumph of death" in relation to the Black Plague of the 1300s in Europe.

Most importantly that multiplier discounts that lockdowns had huge effects on the performance of routine health procedures.

How many cancers were missed? How much did the rate of failure for medical procedures go up? Also how much slower were the ambulance services due to all the COVID protocols?

I suspect that if we had done nothing that graph would have been more skewed to the right

It's an old people problem the same way influenza is an old person problem. It has almost the same curve for lethality vs age. Just ten times worse across the board, except for older children where they're in the same ballpark. Now I'm not terribly worried about death and disability from influenza as a younger adult, but it hospitalized me as a child and has laid me on my ass as an adult twice. ("It's just like the flu" was never too reassuring even if it had been true, eh?)

I don't know of anyone arguing that old people should die. However, just because old people die doesn't mean you get to take away the rights of the rest of the population.

Texas lt. gov argued for exactly that: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/21/texas-dan-patrick-ec...

I don't see a statement about old people in that article. He seems to be arguing a more nuanced approach is necessary than locking down the entire state, even if that approach costs a few (hundred) lives

actual quotes that you could easily find:

« No one reached out to me and said, 'As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?' And if that's the exchange, I'm all in, »

« I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me ... that what we all care about and what we all love more than anything are those children," he added. "And I want to, you know, live smart and see through this, but I don't want to see the whole country to be sacrificed, and that's what I see. »

Ah, alright. I see them. Isn't this more of an argument about not going to any lengths to protect them as opposed to an argument that they should just die?

It’s a pretty thin line between the two regardless of how you interpret it no?

Can the title be edited to include the ,, please?

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