I'm 32 and not ready to die - anyone else care to demonstrate it's not just older people this will hit hardest?

[Helenshielding]

I keep seeing posts by people saying they dont think we should be on lockdown to protect older people who will "die next year anyway" or similar.

Here's the thing, over 70s are not "old" these days. People can live well into their 80s, 90s and 100s now.

I'm 32, I've survived cancer (which is now clear- it is not a case of it being controlled, it's been gone for 10 years), I happen to have some lung damage. I dont know what my life expectancy is, but I know it's not 33.

So if you're moaning about socially distancing etc for older adults, stop. You're doing it to prevent deaths of all ages. Younger people with no underlying conditions are dying of this virus.

Stay home. Shut up. Stop moaning. We will all get through this a hell of a lot quicker.

[Bizawit]

@Fairybatman, yes I do. I understand everything you are saying and we all know very well the theory behind why we are doing this. You don’t need to patronise others.

It is true that younger people are more likely to get seriously ill than to die, but older people are more at risk of both. You quote some statistics but don’t say where they come from and they are lacking in some context and detail. The UK’s data is hard to find right now but here is some data from Ireland. The samples are small and there are limitations to the data but I think it is interesting nonetheless.

Anyways, Yes I understand that we are trying to flatten the curve to avoid the nhs becoming overwhelmed, because if the nhs becomes overwhelmed more people will die. Some of those people will be younger adults, the overwhelming majority will be older people.

Meanwhile lockdown has its own devastating consequences and there are serious questions as to whether it is effective, realistic and sustainable.

[Fairybatman]

The data that I quoted is from a CDC press release on 16th March covering the demographic of confirmed cases in the US. I cited it a couple of pages back.

[Zilla1]

To me, the alternatives have costs and benefits. Circumstances are different between 1918 pandemic 'flu and now and this looked at USA. I'm sure lots of holes can be picked in the following. But for those who are convinced that lockdown shouldn't have happened, children's futures 'are being stolen', only the economics are important and the economics of lockdown are worse than not locking down, I found the following extract was an interesting read to me. It's in a popular magazine discussing a research paper. The magazine link is - www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/new-laws-pandemic-economics/609265/

Rule 1: “Save the economy or save lives” is a false choice.
Last week, a group of economists from the Federal Reserve and MIT published a paper on the 20th century’s most murderous flu, the 1918 outbreak. Because the federal government in 1918 offered little if any economic assistance to suffering Americans, the local response from city leaders varied widely. Some places, such as New York and St. Louis, quickly ordered social distancing and other interventions, while others, such as New Haven and Buffalo, allowed public gatherings even weeks after the flu reached crisis levels. This variance gave researchers the ability to see which cities recovered the fastest after the outbreak.

“We were expecting that the areas with more [social distancing] would have a worse economy but less mortality,” said Emil Verner, a co-author of the paper and a finance professor at MIT. But early and aggressive interventions both saved lives and triggered a faster rebound in several measures, such as job growth and banking assets.

Annie Lowrey: We need to start tossing money out of helicopters

The infamous trade-off between people and GDP? It doesn’t exist—or, at least, it didn’t in 1918. The reason, Verner told me, is that pandemics are “so, so disruptive that anything that you can do to mitigate that destructive impact of the pandemic itself is going to be useful.” Without a healthy population, there can be no healthy economy.

This simple idea has some weird implications. “In a normal recession, you want to boost demand,” said the Northwestern economist Martin Eichenbaum. “But we don’t really want to boost demand in the very short run at all, right now. We don’t want United to be flying full planes. We don’t want restaurants serving food to dine-in customers. We want everybody to stay in and hold on.”

It follows that we should—as incomprehensible as this may sound—hope for a deep, short recession, caused by a cliff dive in many forms of economic activity. That would be a clear signal that people have gone home and that the face-to-face economy has been shut down to limit the spread of disease.

“The question I would ask of our leaders is: What will you regret?” Eichenbaum said. “Will the government regret that it didn’t save money in early 2020? Or will it regret that we let a viral infection kill millions of people, which also, by the way, led to the death of a lot of great companies? It’s pretty obvious what the worst-case scenario is. You want to err on the side of saving lives.”

[larrygrylls]

Zilla,

In some ways the ideal would be a hard lockdown like China’s. The problem is we would have to do it globally and synchronise it.

Otherwise we would have to seal borders long term.

The World was very different in 1918. Planes just were not an issue and travel, in general, was so much less.

So, if we could roll the clock back 100 years or so, that makes a lot of sense. I really hope that we can all get this under control simultaneously but, if not, as soon as a lockdown ends, case numbers will start increasing again.

[Zilla1]

I expect there will be a lot of economic analysis of the differences within devolved nations like the US and between nations (Sweden) to illustrate what approach was best, much like there were case studies post-2008 about how best to handle the bank/credit crisis. I've seen a lot of assertion that the lockdown shouldn't have happened. My initial feeling was that the economic effects of no lockdown would be significant and may be worse, though I'd no evidence. This was the first piece I've found looking at the economic effects of handling any pandemic. As you say, the world has changed and COVID is different to 'flu.