If you look at it from the standpoint of resource management it makes more sense. We spent trillions on this. If we focused the money on the vulnerable they would have more resources to work with. We could have turned each nursing home into a gold-plated positive-pressure fortress of protection.
By doing this the vast majority of people can go back to their lives with little or no problems from the disease. I’m suggesting that we greatly increase the safety of nursing homes instead of a mediocre increase diluted by the diversion of money needed for economic repair.
Absolutely there are vulnerable people in places with limited resources which can stress hospital systems. The survival rate for people under 50 is still estimated to be 99.98%+. The question being discussed is why some people are loosening up behavior. For younger people, they are likely realizing they aren’t nearly as at risk as first believed.
You said, in the past tense, that we had hospitals overloaded. That isn’t a past tense issue; it’s a current problem, just in different places than on the first round.
I went looking for that figure, but don’t find it. Link please?
SARS-CoV-2 infection is not benign in younger adults, especially among those with underlying medical conditions,§§§ who are at risk for hospitalization, severe illness, and death
In any case, two points:
One, there are a whole lot of people older than 50 who are not in nursing homes. (This may be more in response to Magiver, I haven’t time to check back through the thread whether you’ve been saying the same thing.)
Two, the issue with younger people isn’t only that they might die or have permanent damage from it. It’s also that they may give it to other people who may do so.
If what you’re saying is just that younger people are more likely to get careless because they’re more likely to think they’re invulnerable, that may be true.
I think another point goes to how we define “essential goods and services”. I can live without a LOT of goods and services for 3 weeks. Take it to three months and that list is gets shorter. Take it to three years, and the list is WAY shorter.
In seeing a whole lot of COVID related business disruptions not caused by lockdowns. They are caused by businesses having to shut down because their employees are getting sick. My nephew works for a cement and stone company that had to close one of their two plants for two weeks because of sick employees. The lawyer handling my moms estate is still in “work from home” mode because on of their lawyers got COVID. It’s my understanding that they had to reschedule all in-person hearings.
I’m not saying that economic harm could’ve been avoided completely.
But think of how much could’ve been avoided if we’d know in February that capacity reductions and lockdowns were possible. We could’ve planned AHEAD. Remember those 2 weeks or so that were lost completely while we all figured out how to do what we do remotely?
We could’ve gotten those back. If there were locally based metrics for reducing capacity, locking down and reversing these actions, we could’ve mitigated the damage. Some areas might have locked down sooner and longer, but some might’ve locked down later and not as long.
The whole thing was handled horribly on the federal level.
This is making me feel ill, so I’m going to log onto the national testing website that Google developed in conjunction with our government and schedule a test at the center located in my local Walmart parking lot.
Promises kept, amirite? More people need to remember that one.
Yeah, can we cool it with the “young people are selfish” meme? Frankly, as a college professor, I think we are not giving them nearly enough credit. The vast majority of them have gone along cooperatively enough with what is, honestly, a massive ask – that they sacrifice not only their social lives, but their education, their career prospects, and their mental health, to protect older people**. And it looks like we will be asking this of them for a year or more at an age where a year or more feels like much more of your life than it does to us middle-aged folks.
** Before anybody chimes in with “But young people can die too!” or “But permanent organ damage!” – the first statement is meaningless without any acknowledgement that they are about a thousand times less likely to die than the elderly, and the evidence for the second is pretty tenuous so far, although that hasn’t stopped people from running with it on social media. Honestly, I’m getting the distinct impression that people want young people to be at a much higher risk than they actually are – partly because it fits better with our intuitive sense of what’s “fair,” but also because if we convince ourselves that we’re just asking young people to protect themselves, we don’t have to face all the hard ethical questions about how much it’s right or reasonable to expect one generation to sacrifice for another.
FWIW, I don’t think it’s college students who are the problem. Everything I’ve seen and heard implies that it’s post-college twenty-something and thirty-somethings who are the issue.
Even if we look at those age 75+ (who are most likely to be susceptible to poor outcomes from a coronavirus infection, simply due to their age), only a small fraction of them are in nursing homes.
There are between 1.4 and 1.5 million Americans in nursing homes (source: US News & World Report). Of those:
26.4% of them are ages 75-84
33.8% of them are ages 85-94
7.8% of them are ages 95 and older
Applying those percentages to the 1.5 million in nursing homes, we get:
There are 6,604,958 Americans ages 85+ (the spreadsheet I found on that page doesn’t break age out further past “85+”)
So, combining those two sources:
2.5% of Americans ages 75-84 are in nursing homes (396,000 / 15,969,872)
9.4% of Americans ages 85+ are in nursing homes ((507,000+117,000) / 6,604,958)
Granted, those who are in nursing homes are likely to be among the most medically vulnerable. And, absolutely, we, as a country, need to be doing better at keeping those in nursing homes safe from the virus.
That said, the vast majority of older Americans are not in those nursing homes. They, too, are at substantially higher risk for poor outcomes if they become infected, and they are more likely to be out and about as they live their daily lives than those in their cohort who are in nursing homes).
I disagree with @Magiver that such means the only focus should be on protecting these most vulnerable better, but protecting them better (in ways that also preserve their quality of life) should have been job one and was/is the biggest bang for the buck of things to do. Within the age group the risk for those not in nursing homes is much smaller (still sizable) than those in the homes.
I agree completely, @DSeid, and the fact that those in nursing homes make up an outsized proportion of the deaths makes much sense. That said, I suspect that it has not only been a function of the fact that those in nursing homes are more medically fragile, but also that they are in communal living environments, and interacting with many caregivers and workers who come in and out of the facilities every day.
The point I was hoping to make was that the idea of being able to address the issue of illness among seniors by being super-vigilant about protecting the elderly who are in nursing homes, effectively ignores the 90+% of seniors who do not live in those facilities, many of whom are also at substantial risk from the disease.
If 40% of the deaths are coming from nursing homes, that means that 60% of deaths are NOT coming from nursing homes. 60% of 200,000 gets to be a pretty big number. Some of you are acting as if all the deaths are coming from nursing homes.
If its context is the population of nursing homes, while the context of the 60% is the population of not nursing homes, then no, it’s not. It is many orders of magnitude larger. Many.