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The sad thing is that none of this was inevitable. A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. We'll be coun

• mercy_dude 4y ago
• BrianOnHN 4y ago
  > A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. Also why medicare is the US makes no sense to me.
  • refurb 4y ago
    That’s seems extreme. Nothing wrong with providing medical care to the elderly.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Something wrong with medical care for 80+ year olds being a political priority and ensuring every child gets a nutritious lunch at school not being a political priority. My grandpa got taxpayer funded dialysis at 95+ while I was offered defrosted cardboard pizza for lunch everyday, and would have had to pay for it.
      • Nullabillity 4y ago
        You can do both, it's not an either/or.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
          Maybe, maybe not. But it is clear which one has priority for US voters.
          • user_7832 4y ago
            > But it is clear which one has priority for US voters. Just would like to point out that older people tend to vote much more than younger folks.
      • beej71 4y ago
        This isn't surprising to me. Most old voters don't want to die broke on the street, and most younger people don't want to see their grandparents die broke on the street, either. As someone currently on the line between young and old, I get that.
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    • iso1631 4y ago
      Everything wrong providing free medical care to old people who cost a fortune, but not young people who in aggregate cost hardly anything, but some will cost a fortune if they're unlucky
    • mantas 4y ago
      Priorities. Modern medicine can do wonders, but it costs a fortune. Providing everyone with state-of-the-art solutions on time is difficult.
  • fortran77 4y ago
    We also sacrificed the healthy-weight for the sake of those who chose an obese lifestyle. https://www.science.org/content/article/why-covid-19-more-deadly-people-obesity-even-if-theyre-young https://www.science.org/content/article/why-covid-19-more-de... Many mistakes were made with COVID response.
    • ravenstine 4y ago
      What's alarming is how quickly it has become not politically correct to suggest that anything about obesity is unhealthy or undesirable. I'm not saying to go around shaming fat people, but there's a reality to obesity that we all (at least in the United States) have been increasingly in denial about. It's a marker for disease. That doesn't mean that all obese people have a related pathology, but metabolic pathologies correspond with obesity enough that people should be concerned. Part of the problem is that humans are short-sighted, and humans of modern technological society have an even shorter attention span, hence it's not obvious that the actions of today lead to problems of tomorrow. It might seem inconsequential to be obese today, but problems of varying degree are almost inevitable down the road. Maybe it's cardiovascular disease, or wear on joints, or cancer, or sleep apnea, or diabetes, or whatever. These things aren't trivial, but humans are mentally adaptable and can get used to anything, whether it's enslavement or the disrepair of their own bodies. It's been distressing to me when some individuals I know who have bought into fat-positivity have suggested that there's actually nothing wrong with being fat and that it's a "sliding-scale", as if obesity can only possibly be a bad thing at the point of immobility. In reality, any amount of obesity can be a sign of dysfunction. But to suggest this is now considered offensive by some, such to the point that the media won't touch it with a 10-foot pole and even many doctors have stopped taking the weight of their patients. If people are going to play the "if it just saves one life" card when it comes to measures against COVID, then they'd better fucking stop living in a fantasy land and consider whether the lack of health of the population is causing excess early death.
      • vharuck 4y ago
        As somebody who works in public health in the United States, I can guarantee that obesity is seen as an epidemic, tracked in the population with annual surveys, and targeted as a component of disease. Governmental and non-profit public health organizations spend lots of money and time fighting obesity. They'll never advertise programs as a way for somebody to stop being obese, because accusing your audience of a moral failing is just bad advertising.
  • jleyank 4y ago
    Consider it a benefit for spending 40+ years working and providing the glue that held society together. Not everybody cashed out big time. You can always turn it down and pay for things yourself. Or, you can work to turn the us into a place similar to the rest of the world where there is less profit made from people’s health. I would think it useful to be a startup that didn’t have to worry about providing health insurance or for workers to know they don’t face disaster when laid off.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  Protecting the old was never the reasoning.
  • ravenstine 4y ago
    No offense, but where have you been? In the United States, protecting the elderly has been the prevalent reasoning in the media and was naturally a part of the public sentiment. The idea that the public's attention should be shifted to protecting children from COVID mostly became a thing in response to schools reopening (and not reopening) and because "don't kill grandma" became a tired phrase.
    • ben-schaaf 4y ago
      It would depend on the media you consume, but for me (in Australia) it's always been "flatten the curve" - ie. reduce infections so the health system doesn't get overwhelmed. Once hospitalizations were under control through vaccinations pretty much all restrictions were lifted.
    • analog31 4y ago
      Most people were thinking closer to home: Don't kill me. My family saw a woefully inadequate behavioral response in the community (crowded bars, restaurants, shops), and practically our only source of uncontrolled exposure to the covid denial crowd was at school. If Dad dies or becomes long term disabled, we'll all be homeless.
    • avgcorrection 4y ago
      Where I was during a pandemic? Could have been many places.
• D_Alex 4y ago
  >A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. That's not what happened. What actually happened is that we sacrificed everyone's future for some short term "freedoms". Unless we find a proper vaccine, today's children will live their whole life with this disease. Spending an extra week sick each year, accumulating organ damage and maybe dying at the age of 50 after their twentieth bout of covid.
  • pantalaimon 4y ago
    Is there anything to support this fearmongering? From all I’ve heard subsequent infections tend to be more benign - which is how the immune system usually works.
    • D_Alex 4y ago
      • peteradio 4y ago
        "I don't think you can generalize [the study] to everybody, but really for people that have risk factors for severe disease," he says, because veterans tend to be older and have more health conditions." This is not a controlled study, its comparative across number of reinfections. There can be a correlation between overall health and ability to be reinfected. If your health is poor you will be overall more likely to experience death etc as well as symptomatic Covid infection.
        • D_Alex 4y ago
          >"I don't think you can generalize [the study] to everybody... because veterans... It would be weird if veterans were the opposite to everyone else though. >here can be a correlation between overall health and ability to be reinfected But the study is about the severity of reinfection rather than the frequency
          • 4y ago
• jleyank 4y ago
  Note that everybody wishing to protect the young over the old will be old one day. I assume their attitude will have shifted? Or, will they go willingly into the booth to free up resources?
  • affgrff 4y ago
  • brippalcharrid 4y ago
    If we take the Quality-Adjusted Life Years model to be relatively neutral, then lockdowns and other Pandemic Restrictions were a vastly disproportionate expenditure of wealth for the purposes of extending the lives of the elderly. Neonatal intensive care doesn't even come close as an example of ways that society prioritizes the health of the young in terms of QALYs.
  • x3qt 4y ago
    It's very dependant on culture, slavic elders used to go into the forests forever once they notice that they should require daycare soon.
  • anthonypasq 4y ago
    I actually cant imagine being this selfish. If i was 85 and living in a nursing home, the idea of society protecting my last couple years of life at the expense of millions of children's childhood seems insane. never mind that fact that covid policies made those peoples lives a living hell anyway. Absolutely crushing loneliness because visitors werent allowed and they werent even allowed to see their families as they were dying. Unfathomably cruel, and for what purpose?
• user_7832 4y ago
  > A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. Press X to doubt (the point being argued). Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40. And not to forget long covid's disastrous effects on all ages. I agree that the entire situation could have been better managed (for example it took till December 2020 for the Dutch gov to mandate masks in public areas, the night curfew timings were odd), but I disagree that a proper thorough response wasn't required.
  • heurisko 4y ago
    > Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40. And not to forget long covid's disastrous effects on all ages. I expect the number of younger people dying from missed cancer screenings etc. from Covid policies is higher. The rate of mental health referrals amongst young people also surged. https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/the-pandemic-has-driven-unprecedented-surge-in-demand-for-mental-health-services-for-children-and-young-people https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/the-pandemic-has-...
  • origin_path 4y ago
    "Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40." If that were true, it would have happened everywhere. If we steelman the COVID policy case by looking at Sweden, which should theoretically be the worst hit place, what we see is that there was no excess death for under 75s in 2020. There have been many claims that COVID kills the young. But these claims must be exaggerated because it doesn't show up in the data, at least not for Europe. If we look at Euromomo, so incorporating countries with far harsher restrictions and worse healthcare systems, then we also cannot see any mortality under 40: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps The first age range where mortality is seen is 45-64 years. But even there, we are talking about a change from ~9k deaths a week (normal) to ~11k deaths a week in each wave, which for a place the size of Europe is hardly a crisis level change.
  • kcplate 4y ago
    > Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40 After 27 months, I know of literally no one younger than 40 who was even hospitalized due to Covid-19. I know a total of 5 people who were briefly hospitalized from it, all older than 60. I know of (very elderly family members of acquaintances) 4 people who died from it. I live in an area where there are 3M people within a radius of 50 miles. We had no mask mandates, no lockdowns. I keep hearing how much Covid has affected/dangerous for the younger populace (necessity for vaccination, tele-education, school masking, etc…) but from my own experience, I didn’t see it.
• hotpotamus 4y ago
  I'd say one of the few constants of human societies is that the wars are fought by the young.
• zvmaz 4y ago
  > A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. Have you considered the millions of bereft "young" people who lost a parent, for instance? Or how many orphans it has created[1]? The pandemic has been an unfathomable disaster on all fronts, for everyone. - A bereft "young" man. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/covid-19-hidden-heartbreaking-toll-millions-of-orphaned-children https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/covid-19-...
  • heurisko 4y ago
    That the pandemic caused suffering, is without question. The question is whether the measures deployed to combat it caused more harm, overall, than good. In the UK, children died during lockdown, who may have lived had they been in regular contact with school who could have noticed abuse. Cancer patients found their cancer could have been caught earlier. Mental health conditions have surged amongst young people, including those such as anorexia. There was never a public debate on the full picture. It was either support every, often illogical, policy, or you're labelled as an "antivaxxer" or "granny killer".
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• edanm 4y ago
  > The sad thing is that none of this was inevitable. I'd like to push back on your framing of this. Whether you think everything was "hysteria" or not, whether you think the measures taken in the wake of Covid were net-good or not... Either way you look at it, the ground truth is that there was a pandemic, which would inflict some amount of damage no matter what. You might think that a less "hysterical" approach would've caused less overall damage, but damage would've been done either way. When a tornado strikes a city (for example), the government response can be better or worse, but at its base, it's an act of nature that causes some amount of damage no matter what.
  • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    I don't see how this comment does anything other than explain the reason why we're having this discussion in the first place, unfortunately.
    • mrow84 4y ago
      That seems to be the author’s intent - to explain why we are having the discussion, rather than dismissing the cause as mere hysteria.
      • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
        Fair point, cheers.
• shp0ngle 4y ago
  Have you been in Manila? People are stacked on top of each other. Covid was bad as it was, with open school would be even worse. That being said, I am not sure why are school still closed there. In other countries in the SEA region, they are being reopened?
• DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  Few people in the West like to hear this, but by almost every measure, the zero-CoVID approach followed in mainland China, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere was superior to the let-it-rip approach followed by most Western countries. Just to take mainland China as an example: 1. Economically, China has outperformed almost every country during the pandemic. It was the only major economy to grow in 2020, and it had solid growth in 2021. 2. We always hear about lockdowns in China, but most of China hasn't experienced a serious lockdown since early 2020. Shanghai went from April 2020 to April 2022 without a lockdown. Then it had one severe lockdown (ironically, triggered by a failed attempt to follow a "living with the virus" approach). Most cities have not had the type of lockdown that Shanghai had. Schools, restaurants, bars, etc. have been open throughout the vast majority of China for most of the pandemic. There are three approaches to dealing with the virus: 1. Do nothing: 0.5% of your population dies. 2. Mitigation: social distancing, closures or restrictions for certain businesses, mask-wearing. Lots of people die, but hopefully a vaccine comes out before most people are infected. Most rich countries did some variant of this. Notably, after the first wave, the US was much closer to the "do nothing" approach, and lost 0.3% of its population. 3. Zero-CoVID: maximum effort to eliminate the virus, followed by much lower-intensity measures to prevent the virus from regaining a foothold. Long-term, this requires border quarantine for people coming in from abroad, regular testing to catch new outbreaks quickly, and extremely good contact tracing and localized lockdowns to nip new outbreaks in the bud. This policy has to be continued at least until there are vaccines or effective therapeutics. > A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. From an East Asian perspective, this is an incredibly immoral thing to say. Old people built the world that young people live in, and they deserve respect and care. That might be why most of East Asia followed either a zero-CoVID policy or a much more rigorous mitigation policy than the West.
  • caminante 4y ago
    FTA: > By the end of May [2022] pupils in 13 countries were still enduring some restrictions on face-to-face learning—among them China, Iraq and Russia. Your suggested approaches aren't reflective of current circumstances. We have vaccines; yet, lockdowns affecting early education are still in effect.