I'm almost positive that 20% number is not accounting for the adjusted actual infections. For example, New York has had 380k official infections. According to this, New York has had 90k hospitalizations due to the virus. That equals out to 24% of infections causing hospitalizations. However, that's not including adjusting for the actual infection number, which New York anti-body tests have shown that is 10x the official infection count, which will bring the hospitalization percent down to 2.4%.
2.4% of a hundred million is rather a lot of people, you know. Numbers which can easily be reached without societal restraint.
It's a hell of a lot less than basically a quarter of a hundred million. I've never claimed or implied to not have any restraint, I'm listing the numbers as they are.
The problem with these numbers is that they don't tell the whole story. Suddenly every person that dies of Covid is one too many when ofcourse under non-Covid circumstances people would have died as well. Which begs the question: for the vast majority of hospitalizations was Covid the cause of death or was it underlying disease or advanced age with Covid simply being the final straw?
In that case, they're a covid-19 death. If you punch a 20-something who falls to the ground and gets back up with just a bruise, and then an 80-year-old man who because of the frailty of his advanced years suffers a subdural haemmorhage and dies, nobody argues the 80-year-old died of old age-related infirmity.
20% of over-65s, maybe. Figures vary from place to place, but generally somewhere between a fifth to a half of people hospitalised appear to be dying. If the infection fatality rate is about 0.5-1% as most studies seem to be currently indicating, that suggests no more than 5% of people who contract covid-19 require hospitalisation, a minority of which need critical care.
That is a very weak comparison. There is no deliberate intent with a virus. If someone of 80 gets punched and dies the person responsible is still charged with murder even if the 80-year old would have died a day later of natural causes. It's a different situation if one is to facilitate care and forced to make a cost/benefit analysis with scarce resources. The assumption is that covid-19 warrants these drastic measures of indefinite lockdowns, drastic increase of state deficit, job loss and collateral damage in healthcare of delayed/cancelled interventions but when the majority of people in ICU's consists of advanced age and/or very sick with one foot already in the grave than you can atleast challenge that assumption.
Technicallly I don't think anyone dies of 'old age' theres always some other reason. Being old just makes you increasingly prone to health problems until something gives.
Better one than the other, but the proper answer is somewhere in the middle. The harder you lock down, the less covid will overrun the healthcare system. Treatment is available, fewer people die even if the same amount get sick eventually, and you avoid system collapse. But also, the harder you lockdown, the more negative consequences lockdown has AND the slower the virus spreads, so the longer you have to remain in lockdown, AND problems exacerbated by turning off people's lives cause exponentially more damage as you lengthen the quarantine.
One problem with what you're saying. New Zealand and other countries are proof of concept that eradication is viable. They told us at the start it wasn't and the best we could hope for is flattening the curve, but turns out eradication is doable. It will probably happen in Australia too soon if the protests didn't mess it up. It's almost certainly going to happen here once we our last two in Tasmania recover.
A person that dies when having covid-19 when they otherwise would not is a covid-19 death. (What is potentially tricky is identifying whether covid-19 actually did contribute to their death.)
Universal healthcare does not mean "everyone except the elderly", and the principle that we can discriminate against certain demographic groups to save society as a whole a few bucks poses something of a moral hazard. Who do we sacrifice next? South Asians? People with aspergers? Red-haired people?
Well yeah, I understand that from the perspective of doctors/nurses who will always try to do what is best for the patient. But before admission you could have for example a triage where people with really bad prognosis get palliative care and not invasive ICU care many don't even recover from or live maybe a month longer under the most horrible conditions. That way you could take a large chunk of stress and workload away from operational medical staff not equipped for these kind of decisions.
Unfortunately resources aren't infinite so choices are always being made whether implicit or explicit that has nothing to do with who is 'discriminated against'.
No, those figures are accurate and still track, the problem is you guys aren't paying attention to what I said and are conflating "medical intervention" with "hospitalization". Those two terms are not synonymous, and mean completely different things; hospitalization is admission to a hospital for care, medical intervention is any care employed to alter the outcome of a condition. Hospitalization is a type of medical intervention, but not all medical interventions are hospitalizations.
Resources don't need to be infinite in order to provide sufficient healthcare for the entirety of the population. Sufficient resources to do so are easily within American capacity: sacrifice a tiny minuscule fraction of defence spending, for instance-- still leaving the US with a military ten times more powerful than any other-- and you could double healthcare expenditure. The paucity of resources is a myth.
New Zealand is an island. It has less than half the population density of the US. It's first case of covid was found on February 28th.
Even if that is true(mind that in Europe 'collective' healthcare spending already reaches into the stratosphere) then you would still have the issue of finite doctors, nurses and ICU personnel. Human resources are also a resource even if money grew on trees. Sooner or later you'll run into limitations.
Why? Its only a difference of scale. Why does being a tiny island matter? America is just a bigger island in a way.
Or be a bit sneakier, and keep the military funding the same, but dedicate a lot more of it to their medical services and then let them help civilians. You still get to give them green uniforms and military ranks if you want.
