That’s a half-truth. No, it’s a quarter truth. And you’re just writing off those over age 64 or with other risk factors. Thanks a lot. That’s most of my immediate family (even tho’ none of us are obese and all but one of us lead considerably healthier than average lifestyles.)
What you leave out is that between the people over 64, and people with some other sort of significant health risk COVID-19 can exploit (smoking or other prior lung damage, asthma, compromised immune system, obesity...), we’re talking half the country. Good grief, depending on how it’s defined, 30 - 40% of Americans are obese. One visit to Wal-Mart demonstrates that...
You also leave out how contagious COVID-19 is. This may be a matter of survivability outside the body, efficacy of infection once it lands on a new host, and so on, but the far greater factor is the infectiousness of carriers even while those damned mild symptoms you tout, slowly ramp up. With flu, the vast majority of victims feel bad enough to stay home, and the disease progresses to that level quickly. With COVID-19, the vast majority of infected persons spend several days spreading it around because they DON’T feel bad enough to stay home.
“No vaccine” plays into the spread as well.
The resultant problem is that once community spread gets going, in the absence of very onerous and economically damaging containment measures, and added to already established needs, this level of contagiousness easily causes enough cases needing hospitalization, or even ICU’s, to overwhelm health care resources.
This is NOT speculation, this IS what we are seeing in Italy. We saw it in China, too, until they slammed on the most incredible & massive control / lockdown measures the modern world has ever seen for a disease. South Korea has been magnificent with their testing and isolation of positives, despite a large initial breakout, showing us a possible way forward. However, even there, the situation is dicey. Can they keep a lid on it?
Whose responsibility is to protect you if you are in bad shape physically and over age 60? Of course every one has to evaluate their own situation and lessen their risk by isolating themselves as much as possible.
I stand by my statement that fatality rate for people under age 50 in good physical shape is miniscule with covid-19. That category of people get symptoms similar to a mild infection from common influenza. No point forcing them into quarantines of various style.
Personally I am much more scared of the list of diseases I enumerated than covid-19.