SvennoJ said:
Pyro as Bill said:
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.
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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?
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I was using the numbers from the Italian and South Korean studies which have no-one under 30 dying and have lower percentages than China for 30-39yr olds. I wouldn't be so blase about 0.2%.
If we knew the probability of a more deadly mutation then 0.2% could be a no-brainer assuming it offers some immunity.
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