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For what it’s worth, there was a FluBro on another thread making the case for letting it rip through the country. He basically said two things:

1) He agrees that older people will need to isolate. He didn’t quite try to explain how that works, since not all old people live alone, or are capable of living alone, much less for what may be several months. Nor did he define just what constitutes being ‘old’.

2) He said that the virus death rate for younger people was the same as the flu. This is one that made me want to reply (but he wasn’t worth my time). The death rate of the flu, for ALL Americans is something like 1 out of 1000 cases...which comes pretty close to matching the death rate for the youngest victims of Coronavirus. Two things here:

a) The Coronavirus doesn’t look at your birth certificate to determine whether to kill you. The increase in death rate is does grow with age, in what appear to be a smooth curve - so if you’re 45 years old, you do have a significantly higher chance of dying than someone 25 years old - even though most here would agree that 45 years of age does not make you an ‘old person’.

b) The flu kills OLD PEOPLE - Just like Coronavirus, the death rate from the flu is not constant throughout age groups. I doubt anyone here can think of a single case of a child, or even a young adult, dying from the flu. Although I haven’t done the math, even at 0.1%, I wouldn’t be surprised if Coronavirus would become the leading cause of death for the younger age groups, if left unchecked.

We have heard the same old FluBro arguments here for weeks.

They are based on several logical fallacies:

(1) Focus on the death rate

This is a really dumb way to look at a disease where most people still have not even recovered from the first wave. In addition, the death rate is not a static figure. With excellent health care in place the death rate will be much lower than if the health care system is overwhelmed. If you "let 'er rip" the death rate will be very high.

(2) Focus on age

This is a dangerous and evil error--since overwhelmed health care systems will triage the elderly which will make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the elder stay home (which most are doing anyway) then they will just triage folks in their 60s instead of their 70s.

(3) Ignore the impact on non CV diseases, injuries etc.

If the health care system is overwhelmed many folks who could have been saved will die of other diseases/injuries.

(4) No politician would dare try to "let her rip" for very long.

The pictures of corpses being dumped outside hospitals would not be acceptable to any population. The relatives of the dead would turn into angry mobs very quickly.