[Discuss Thrower]

Originally Posted by kgrund

Quite honestly, until you know the answer to that your first point lacks any context IMO. To be more specific you would want to know how many in NYC died of the flu on average each season in NYC.

New York City probably has fewer than 100 people under the age of 45 die of the flu annually, which I'm guessing is hamas's point.

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

It's not 347 out of the total population that age, it's 347 out of the total population that age infected with COVID, and you know it.

I'd be interested to know how many people that age died of flu on average each season.

Well no, because you were off responding to the random appearance by a Mike Maslowski fan's post concerning the number of NYC deaths as a percentage of the NYC population.

If NYC reported ~118,000 cases as of yesterday and the under 45 population is 56% of the total, then confirmed cases in the under 45 population "should" be about 65,900 and I say "should" as in "that's understating by a huge amount."

If that's the accurate count of cases, then 0.5% of people infected by C-19 have died. I'd bet no other commonly communicable disease gets to the point of killing 1 out of every 200 people under the age of 45. If that death rate were extrapolated to the entire USA, then it's a few tenths of a percent higher than the annual car crash mortality rate for that same age group.

Odds are though there aren't 65,900 people under the age of 45 infected by C-19 in New York. It's probably triple that and then the 347 of that tripled amount of cases is about 0.18%. Does that match any other easily communicable disease? I'll go ahead and assume the answer is no.

But making sure it's fewer than 1 out of every 200 or 550 people in any particular age demographic dying from C-19 hasn't been main motivation as has been said from public health officials. The motivation is to prevent an overload of health care resources (particularly intensive care) by C-19 patients to the detriment of health care providers themselves and other patients needing those same resources. Ideally, more lives are saved with the efforts taken than they would have without since the broader health care system remains able to operate, yes, but not people specifically with C-19.

Have we succeeded at this? I say no. At the moment, most areas have prevented an overload of C-19 cases in their local health care systems. Key phrase being "at the moment." If C-19 is as easily transmissibleand yields X amount of deaths for every N of cases, then there has been no appreciable effort to ready the resources to accommodate an influx of cases. Manufacturers pivoted to create ventilators, but in this layman's opinion, I'd wager (if I didn't have such bad luck in that regard lately) that we're going to find out that intubating people makes as much sense as trepanating someone with a sinus headache but whatever. The medical conventional wisdom says ventilators are the last line of defense so I'll give us that so far.

But have we made efforts in many densely populated areas to isolate and treat C-19 cases outside of typical hospitals, meaning there's still a risk that a spike of cases will overload that area's health system? No. And to me, again as someone who isn't bearing a MPH degree and definitely isn't paid to be in a role with that type of competency, that should have been the top-down goal across the country. Testing and tracing? As a layman, it doesn't seem like testing matters barring some sort of miracle device that tells if one within 15 minutes of being test that they are infected with better than 68% certainty of a positive read AND HAS A negligible amount of false negatives.. and such a test must be used for that one person multiple times per day. Tracing? That seems more feasible but will necessitate an abrogation of civil liberties somewhere along the line, which means there isn't a point of me discussing this further in this thread.

So given we are still, at this moment, are perpetually 14 days away from a cascade failure of our health care systems across the country, the question then becomes "how long will 'shelter in place' mandates stay in effect?" Seems to me that the answer is "until there is a vaccine" and to me, that's not an answer since there isn't a guarantee a vaccine will even be effective in the first place.