Yes I agree with you, I am concerned with the elderly & infants. As these are the demographics which usually have higher fatal outcome both in diseases, and even adverse effects from drugs/surgery.
This isn't my stance, but I'll steelman it anyway:
Those at highest risk of death are the 70+. Coincidentally, people 70+ also have already led long lives / have the least utility left to give back to the society that is doing the prioritization. It is therefore more important to give doses to young people first, as someone needlessly dying with 60 years left on their clock is significantly worse than someone who has already had the opportunity to live a full life and statistically would've died within the next 10 years anyway.
The mortality braze is high among elders who likely had their children already or won't get any. Younger people suffer from other conditions primarily.
The truth is most deaths are going to be people near or beyond average life expectancy. I don't want to minimize the impact of any person's death, but I think people in general are willing to accept a fairly high death rate among the elderly, especially considering the most likely to perish are those who were already the most likely to perish.
The death rate among the under-70 population is a different matter. If the medical system is overloaded and working-age people start dying en masse, I imagine that would change public consciousness quickly.
The distribution of these cases is likely to skew towards the Elderly and over 50 demographic. I'd be curious to see the impact of this on the analysis.
It is even a lot worse for people in this age group.
60-70 year olds have a case fatality rate of ~3-4% here in Germany and that despite not being limited by the capacity of the health care system yet. A sixty year old can easily expect a decade or two of extra-lifetime. That's the difference between seeing the grandchild finish school and being a vague memory for them.
It doesn't matter that most people die of cancer or heart diseases, as these are old people and these are also prevalent in other countries. When someone dies at 25 from a drug overdose, however, age expectancy is greatly reduced as more expected years are shaved off. The US has WAY more of those than other developed nations.
Given the ongoing statistics coming out of South Korea (which I'd suggest are the most accurate) where only one person under 50 has died. It seems that these safeguards would be best spent around those aged 60+ and perhaps those 50+ with other health issues.
Those who are younger seem to be mildly affected for the most part and could go on with their lives as long as they didn't interact with the older population.
I wouldn't say it's lethal, at least not for everyone. The last report from Italy has stats on 2000 deaths. No deaths under age of 30 and only a few under 50, all with pre-existing health conditions. Women's median age close to 84. Men's 80. And vast majority of deaths are people with multiple pre-existing health conditions.
What we care about is all causes mortality, or old age quality of life (I'm not even sure how you would measure this). Heart attacks and cancer are the two largest killers, but there are lots of others and so trading a big one for a lesser one at the same age isn't interesting (in fact it could be a negative as the big ones get more research).
Are you proposing that organ transplants be prioritized to the 80 year old chain smoker over the healthy 12 year old?
Are you proposing that old people should be the first off a sinking ship?
Old people have lived life. They should have stayed home and isolated. Kids had practically zero risk. The difference in risk between a healthy 12 year old and the average 80 year old was orders of magnitude different.
reply