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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

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.

Why have hospitals at all? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just let sick people die?They aren't as productive as everyone else.