“Most 72 year old men do not have a difficult time with it.”
***
Last year around April when this scamdemic got us into lockdown, my 76 year old neighbor (with a cane) was one of the first in our area to get it.
He was turned away at the county hospital because they ran out of beds. He fainted TWICE going home from the bus stop and just wrote his will when he slept. He woke up 2 days later and the “fever” was gone, and went back to the hospital for a check-up. The same hosptal who kicked him out now wanted his plasma, but he gave them the FU for leavong him to die.
Mind you this old dude is a Korea war vet, “orders” a hooker twice a month and chain smokes.
What he got last year no longer exists. The Delta mutation is essentially a different virus.
This is a tricky thing to grasp. We all have been learning stuff from last year . . . only the old are in danger, you have to have comorbidities to die . . . all that stuff.
We have no data on that. Delta has replaced the original strain and quickly. Quickly means not much time has passed to gather stats on who dies. Or goes in the hospital (average stay is 10 days, minimum stay is 3 days, anyone over 10 days will have to go to skilled nursing facility for more weeks before home — because long Covid damages organs all over the body). None of that is free, btw.
And if Delta’s numbers are close to last year’s pre Alpha numbers, well, the over 65 population will have 25% more deaths than in 2017, 2018, 2019.