OT: Before hitting the "Normal" button...

[UcMiami]

The comparison of an infectious disease to various other causes of death is really meaningless. We think of 911 as a horror and it changed our world in countless ways, but a death toll of 3000 is meaningless when compared to 126,000 killed by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 or whatever number you use for the Haitian earthquake in 2010. And as for diseases, heart disease claims 600,000+ in the USA each year followed by cancers at nearly the same number. Accidental death comes in at 170,000 (including DUI and other auto deaths.)

The issue is not that people die, but in how we as a nation and as a world society respond to threats - natural disasters are unpredictable in timing but fairly predictable in a general way. We can choose to change building codes and where we build and live based on the knowledge that hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and fires will occur with regularity in certain parts of the country and world. We can and do set up early warning systems, monitoring systems, and mitigation systems to try and cope with our expectations.

We can also pass laws and monitor/enforce behavior to try and reduce accident deaths both on roads and in dangerous professions like mining and construction. How successful we are is dependent on both the collective society and the individuals, but we are constantly reviewing and adjusting our responses.

With heart disease, cancer, stroke, alzheimers, and other diseases, we research and educate and improve care - but these are non-infectious diseases, and depend on individual choices and individual bodily systems. We can and do legislate against carcinogenic chemicals as a society, but we cannot generally legislate individual choices.

Infectious diseases are a different beast because they are 'social'. AIDS came upon us in the 70s and completely changed our social lives - but it is a 'simpler' disease to contain the spread of - it required person to person transfer of bodily fluids. Ebola is similar.

Scientist and disease experts have always feared an 'airborne' infectious disease like the 1917-1920 flu because it does not require physical contact to spread. The common flu is bad enough, but we have learned to live with it because it's death rate is very small. And while we allow it to spread through our populations generally unchecked, its rate of spread is pretty small as well. We have had a few scares with 'Swine Flu' and 'Bird Flu' in the last few decades but neither of these proved to be that outlier flu with high mortality rate, and we have become quite proficient in creating vaccines for flu.

Covid 19 is a different beast - even with extraordinary measures taken to reduce the spread of an airborne virus, there are already 1.75M cases in the US and 100,000 deaths (greater in 3 months than any recent 6 month flu season.) The death rate is an order of magnitude greater than standard flu, and the spread rate also appears to be double. Without the extraordinary measures taken for the last three months the picture would be much more grim. A look at what is happening in Brazil where almost nothing has been done may be a window on what the US would look like now without social distancing - the growth of cases and deaths has been exponential and has not yet begun to slow (and those are just the official numbers in a country that may not being honest with their reporting.) And while the world is working furiously, we have never developed a vaccine for this type of virus, and we have yet to find a mixture of medicines that can mitigate the disease when it turns critical in a patient.

 

[Rocket009]

First, I assume that readers are capable of understanding that 2200 annual alcohol poisoning deaths is @183 deaths per month as opposed to 93 deaths in 3 months (31 deaths per month) from Covid - nearly six times more. And that is choosing the lowest number of the causes of young people deaths I presented.

Second, where did you get .2%? I would say thin air and that nowhere near that many young people die from Covid-19. Maybe 0.2% of the young people who are known to have had it. However, it is well documented that many young people in that age group become infected but remain asymptomatic. That means they the majority of young people who get it are never tested. The true percentage of deaths per infection is probably much lower than that

However, assuming that you are correct, the fact remains that MANY more than 20 families are going to lose their children to pneumonia, alcohol poisoning, DUI, suicide, and drug overdose. Do we shut down colleges to prevent those other types of student deaths? No. Parents know the risks that their children take when leaving the nest to attend college.

You might argue that those other causes of death are "life-style choices" that the youths make whereas coronavirus is a medical condition. However, 185 15-24 year-olds have died of pneumonia during the same timeframe that 93 have died from coronavirus!

Lock them in the house and shelter them from those many causes of death - or let them go on with their lives. If they don't go to college, are they gonna stay locked up with Mom and Dad? Heck no. Even if the parents try, they're still gonna leave the home or sneak out at night to have sex (like they did in high school). We can't lock a generation away til we find a cure (which might never happen)

Some will die of coronavirus. Unfortunate - but it's unfortunate that any person dies at that age but they still do. The herd is thinning due to coronavirus, but this group is one of the least vulnerable.

0.2% was a number that appeared in the chart you included for some of the other countries for that age group - so it wasn't thin air, but your own presented data.

Also you missed the entire point and that is that you argue that because people die of other things that we should not do anything about this. Where as I pointed out that we spend lots of time, money, researching legislation on reducing all of these other causes of death. So why should we ignore something like this?

"The herd is thinning" argument is an uncaring position to take. Real people are dying unnecessarily and I get it - you are OK with this. Others do not share this position.