Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Total tobacco related US mortality is about 500,000 per year, all in (cancer, heart disease, etc.). But much of that results from past use - if you banned tobacco today the number would decline to zero only over 40-50 years. You'd basically get 10 years of life expectancy for the portion of the population that smokes back.
Max. deaths from this round with the TrumpVirus approaches about 3 million.
Assuming high numbers on both, even if you fully eliminate all tobacco consumption, it would likely take more than a decade to save as many lives as we can with good management of this problem.
It's a big fuckin problem.
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If you bend Coltrane's point a bit, however, you highlight a trade-off at the heart of this thing:
We are sacrificing a lot of the young, in many ways, to save the old.
It's true. Younger docs will be in harm's way (bombarded over and over again with the virus, which repetition can cause death in healthy young adults), younger people will lose tons of jobs, younger people will suffer losses of homes and businesses.
There's a daisy chain of horrible things that will be suffered by the young to ensure the old don't perish. Most significantly, immunity, for at least a time, to this virus. For most younger people, its not a big deal. Get it, get over it, and you're protected from it for some period of time. Instead, they're hunkering down and avoiding something that's not much of a risk to them.
So while Coltrane's point about valuing Covid deaths over tobacco deaths might be comparing apples and oranges, the argument that we are prioritizing the lives of the old over the younger cannot be avoided.
If one were an economist, he would say this is valuing the less productive over the more productive. If one looked at it as a business person, he'd said it was protecting cost centers over profit centers.
How much more are we going to demand in sacrifice for the boomers? I understand the humane need to do it. But this is brutally unfair to millennials, who are going to eat the brunt of this if it becomes a U shaped rather than V shaped crisis.
