2 ms·
I see this style of thought a lot, which I find extremely short sided and problematic. It’s like “well they were old anyway so who cares if they die.” Elderly a
by azinman2 7y ago
I see this style of thought a lot, which I find extremely short sided and problematic. It’s like “well they were old anyway so who cares if they die.” Elderly are people too! And just because they’re of a certain age doesn’t mean they were right on the edge of death. My parents are in their 70s/80s, but coronavirus aside, are in great health and I have no reason to think they wouldn’t live another couple of decades like their parents did.
Numbers like 0.5% sound small as an abstract concept, but 0.5% of the US population is still 1.6M ppl. That’s a lot!
- Gibbon1 7y agoTwo observations. One is assume your grand parents get it. For them the CFR is probably 10%. Which means 35% chance one or more of your grand parents will die. The other is peoples social networks tend to skew towards their own age group. But not exclusively. So older people have networks with lots of other old people. Which reminds me I showed up in San Francisco in the mid 90's. I missed the HIV carnage of the 80's. But I have gay friends who are my friends because HIV killed most of their friends and they had to start over.
- irq11 7y ago” I see this style of thought a lot, which I find extremely short sided and problematic. It’s like “well they were old anyway so who cares if they die.” I challenge you to quote the portion of my comment where I said anything resembling this. I stated facts about IFR and its strong age-dependence. I made no judgments about what policies we should pursue based on these facts.
- azinman2 7y agoYou’re right — you didn’t have any judgments per se now that I re-read this. The language was very similar to a lot of arguments people are currently making why we shouldn’t care so much about the virus.