I have no idea what you are talking about. The was not a scintilla of valuing lives according to age in what I said.
Would you agree that if the disease was primarily affecting ten-year-olds, that the emphasis in public policy might wisely be directed at protecting them, rather than force-fitting the same policy for all age groups?
Yeah, I sort of knew I had extrapolated a bit too much with the degree of murder analogy.
Yes, deaths concentrate among the old. If it was cancer, which does the same, clearly there’s no reason to social distance the populace because cancer is generally not contagious. But . . . covid is not cancer. It is contagious.
Look, we’ve done all sorts of things in society, and accepted them, because some problem afflicts society. We have laws all over the books pointed at drunk driving and it only kills 10,000 people a year. We don’t complain about those laws, and it’s only 10,000 people.
To your question, Spanish flu killed mostly the young. Not the old. The young had/have strong immune systems and when the Spanish flu virus was detected by a young person’s body, it reacted with a huge surge of defense and this was a cytokine storm and killed the patient.
In 1918 viruses were vaguely known about. Filters had found that a level of porosity that stopped bacteria still let some infectious something get through. It was thought of as very small bacteria. Genetic strands were not understood then. It was presumed to simply be a very small bacteria. This is why quarantine efforts took place. You can find pictures from the time of people wearing masks. You can find pictures of baseball players wearing masks.
And that was for a disease that killed mostly the young. Measures taken across the country varied. Total shut down some places. Less shutdown other places. Essentially NOWHERE was there no shutdown at all. Children were not the primary targets of that H1N1 virus, it was age 20-40, but they still shut down schools and did “school by phone”.
The point here is I guess 1918 is so far back that we have no memory of it. But if you spend some time reading about Spanish Flu quarantines you’ll see American DID once react to a plague.
There are differences. There is the internet. In 1918 when lockdown was in effect, people put on masks and emptied out bookstores and magazine racks. There are many mentions of job loss at magazine stands because they sold out in a couple of hours to people desperately bored. The magazine stand worker closed up and went home, and paid by the hour he was hit hard.
Did you know the saying “all dressed up and no place to go” came from the Spanish flu? Newspaper ads showed women dressed up but nowhere to go, and tried to sell things to the women (boxes of candy!) in the ad.
Lockdown is not unprecedented. Regardless of target age.