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SvennoJ on 18 March 2020
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Pyro as Bill said:
SvennoJ said:

The logistics and morality of that is beyond that of a dictatorship. First you would need to separate all the under 20 from the rest of the population for 2 to 3 weeks. Then you still make a lot of them seriously ill and kill 1 in 500. Under 50 doesn't mean you're fine, just much less at risk. But 'only' selecting the healthy could further mitigate that problem. Never mind replicating the virus in enough quantity in a safe manner to infect that many people quickly.

Then, we don't know anything yet about long lasting effects. If immunity really works with this, whether you can't spread it on anyway despite your body now being able to deal with it better.

Ventilators, what's their big deal?

It's not just sticking a tube down your throat to push air in and out. Plus the reason for the ventilators is to combat the complications of double pneumonia and inflamation of the lungs to the point lung tissue cannot absorb any oxygen anymore for which you need an ECMO machine.

Then you need trained personal to make sense of all of this while keeping the patient alive with the right combination of meds and oxygenation in a sterile quarantined evironment.

If it was simple we could all stock up on ogygen tanks to get through this 'flu'

I meant this. I get that trained professionals are more important but if each country has a different peak, it's a lot easier to get medics in and out than ship ventilators from hospital A to hospital B.

The kids can have a school camping trip and the 18-30s can be offered a free ticket to a giant pox party music festival and make their own decision. What's the alternative? House arrest until a vaccine comes along seems a lot more dictatorial.

You saw the other pictures. The mention of ventilators as the bottleneck is nothing more than a simplification, there is a lot more to it than hooking someone up to a ventilator. More ventilators and you simply run into the next bottleneck. But yep more will help and China is sending them to Italy to help out as well as medical personal. Which is why it's so important to stretch this out and prevent simultaneous peaks all over the world.

The alternative is not to subject your whole population to a new disease with still many unknowns. Plus plenty younger people still need medical help to get through this. Not only old get sick.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/17/21184291/coronavirus-covid-19-young-people-sick-vulnerable-affected-severe-cases

Yes there are far fewer, but intentionally spreading the virus to millions of young people will still bring down the healthcare system. See the mitigation scenarios here https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

As a percentage of the current 115k infected, the total young people needing critical care is very small.
Looking at under 20 for the UK, that's 7.6 million, about 4 million in there 20's and so on. The mortality rate for these groups is still estimated at 0.2% or about 15 thousand under 20, 8 thousand deaths in the 20 to 30 range. Plus at least double of that will need ICU to get through the disease with 4K ICU beds available in the UK, thus more won't survive.

Is that a sacrifice you're willing to make?