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[Replaced_Texan]

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.

If you read the MMWR, it's not just boomers.

As of March 16, a total of 4,226 COVID-19 cases had been reported in the United States, with reports increasing to 500 or more cases per day beginning March 14 (Figure 1). Among 2,449 patients with known age, 6% were aged ≥85, 25% were aged 65–84 years, 18% each were aged 55–64 years and 45–54 years, and 29% were aged 20–44 years (Figure 2). Only 5% of cases occurred in persons aged 0–19 years.
Among 508 (12%) patients known to have been hospitalized, 9% were aged ≥85 years, 26% were aged 65–84 years, 17% were aged 55–64 years, 18% were 45–54 years, and 20% were aged 20–44 years. Less than 1% of hospitalizations were among persons aged ≤19 years (Figure 2). The percentage of persons hospitalized increased with age, from 2%–3% among persons aged ≤9 years, to ≥31% among adults aged ≥85 years.

Emphasis mine. 20 percent of those in the hospital are in the 20-44 age range.

All of these stats are fucked because we don't have a good sense of who actually has it because the testing has been such a cock up. But the Boomers aren't the only ones taking up those beds.