Its not really the older ones though. We're seeing a lot more 30-40 year olds packing the hospitals and the kids ICUs are filling up in the hotspots. The mess

Its not really the older ones though. We're seeing a lot more 30-40 year olds packing the hospitals and the kids ICUs are filling up in the hotspots. The message was that only 80 year olds die of this disease. But while the risk of death halves with every 8 years younger you are the risk of hospitalization only halves every 15 years. So while a 20 year old is 161 times less likely than an 80 year old to die, they're only 16 times less likely than an 80 year old to be hospitalized (roughly a 1% chance with the alpha variant so probably 2% chance with delta). And that's enough when spread across the entire population because of how resource intensive COVID patients are. Agreed though about public health officials. They are all MDs who were better at playing politics than they were at medicine.