Boom Boom Apathy
I am the Professor. Deal with it!
- Sep 6, 2006
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Looks like our time and effort should have been placed in protecting the older and weaker of the population with out disruption of the rest of population to build a heard immunity.
There are roughly 330M Americans. Of that, roughly 245M are over 19 and older (2018 numbers), so I'll call them adults that make up the workforce.
~35M are 70 and older, thus at risk
~ 80M (30% of adults) have high blood pressure, thus at risk.
~ 30M have diabetes, thus at risk (and another ~ 85M are pre-diabetes).
Now, some of those in each group are the same person, so it's not all additive, but you also have people with compromised immune systems, other ailments, etc... So lets just say that probably 100M adults are either over 70 or are under 70 and have some sort of pre-existing condition to put them in the "weaker" bucket. That's ~40% of the adult population.
I think there might be some merit to the idea of protecting those most at risk while letting those at less risk get back to work and I base it off of data that shows death rates by age group and the news/data about certain pre-existing conditions and the virus's impact on people with those, like diabetes and high blood pressure. But how do you manage protecting tens of millions of people who are at risk? We haven't even been able to protect nursing homes AFTER we knew about it and knew actions needed to be taken based on the first outbreak in Washington.