Disliked{quote}….Now we have two options: sacrifice the elderly (it seems) and not collapse the entire economy, or not sacrifice the elderly and collapse the economy......Ignored
The CDC says that 80% of the people that become infected with the virus will show mild or no symptoms and will not require medical intervention. 15% will show more severe symptoms and will require medical care, and 5% will show major symptoms and require hospitalization. That makes me believe that the actual total number of people infected even now is probably grossly underreported, since most people tend to just take OTC medicine when they get sick, which in turn makes the death rate seem artificially high, which in turn tends to scare people. It is logical that the elderly and those with underlying health conditions/poor immune systems will be affected more so than a healthy individual, and since pneumonia is normally the end results of COVID-19, it makes sense that those in nursing homes and in poor respiratory health succumb faster. But pneumonia is a big deal with the elderly no matter what the initiating cause is, and causes a high death rate on its own.
I wish that a report would come out concerning the deaths as far as age and underlying conditions, as that would make it easier to compare apples to apples. If you dig and dig, you can find the information about Washington state, with majority of the deaths associated with a nursing home/care facility and people with health problems. It might ease some minds if we knew that relatively healthy people below a certain age weather the storm and get over it, much like the flu.