if only illness or death were the extent of the outcomes. unfortunately lingering health issues can affect all ages. :shrug:

Yep.

As with like, nearly every disease out there

It's not wrong. Despite being one of the places that was hit hard early, Michigan is substantially below the national average in cases per capita.

No. They are cumbersome to administer. They are given as an infusion slowly and the recipient has to be watched (nursing staff time) since you are giving a foreign protein there are more reactions to these than to vaccines. In an ER, that means the people are taking up a needed bed. Where I am now and other places, "infusion centers" have been set up to provide this but that requires the patient to be discharged from the ER and to drive (or otherwise go) to an infusion center. Many simply refuse. Remember that these drugs have to be given within 10 days of diagnosis. At that point many people don't feel too bad so they won't bother going to get infused with monoclonal antibodies and by the time they start to feel really sick it's too late.

The average age of death is over 80, and those people generally do not.

Personally at the point where I’m no longer self sufficient, and can’t actually ski down a black run, I’m done. I am an extremely active person. I hate being at home, don’t watch TV, actually kind of hate being inside period. Old age would really not work for me.

The young always feel invulnerable. COVID is no different. Some change their minds on their death beds before they lose consciousness. Cases and hospitalizations among the 18-34 year old set are rising rapidly because the variants are more virulent among them and because a high percentage of older folks are now immune.

But enjoy your couple weeks of feeling miserable if it comes to that.

Or like 3 days. I’ve got a higher risk of death or serious harm every time I ride a bike in London than going to a bar where I might catch Covid.

Risk tolerance is an individual thing, and living is not just the opposite of death. Something I’ve realized recently is that I’m increasingly bored with England because it’s just too safe. Even the landscapes are soft, manicured, rolling green hills. The climate is mild, if wet (the worst weather - I would prefer -10 degrees and sunny to the 50s and rain). There are no harsh, dramatic landscapes or extreme weather. Life needs danger, sex, and violence which are all lacking in that culture. There’s a reason that I like doing things like surfing and backcountry skiing. Without some risk of harm or even death, you’re never really living.

Covid and the restrictions in place over there are just the latest example of this cultural preference for the safe, familiar and boring. The Brits would be happy to just stay quietly in their houses in a way that Americans, or even the Spanish, would not. They’re weenies.

Also, where is your data to suggest that hospitalisations (cases are meaningless) are rising rapidly amongst the 18-34 demographic? Numbers as well as percentages - a big percentage increase on a minuscule number is still a minuscule number.

In December, hospitalization rates were 4.8/100000 among 18-29 year olds and 67.9 among 65+ year olds. The most recent data (March 27) show them to be 2.2/100000 among 18-29 year olds and 12.5 among 65+ year olds. That's a drop from 14:1 to 6:1. And the numbers are changing rapidly as we vaccinate 1% of the population, mostly over 65, every 2 days.

Source: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/covid19_3.html

10023, based on your lifestyle preference, you might as well move back to the US, probably to the Western part. Of course, the cities there that are even close to being urban in a European sense are non existent besides SF and parts of LA and Seattle, but the dramatic natural landscape of the mountains, deserts, forests, and rocky coast will really appeal to your desire for action. There’s also Australia and New Zealand and Western Canada if you still want free healthcare.


As for the topic, I have been volunteering to give vaccines recently and it’s a very easy and quick process.

:haha:

Yeah, unlike the rest of us for whom old age is a dream come true! :uhh:

Anyhow, for a person who hates being sedentary, you sure invested heavily in the sedentary lifestyle when you spent $10,000 on that couch

Isn't falling absolute risk much more important than risk relative to some other age category? And in the previous post you said "Cases and hospitalizations among the 18-34 year old set are rising rapidly because the variants are more virulent among them and because a high percentage of older folks are now immune". Then you posted numbers that appear to show the opposite. I don't know why higher immunity in the older demographics would cause cases and hospitalizations to go up in the younger demographics. I'd expect the opposite due to lower spread between age cohorts. Even if unvaccinated you are better off being around vaccinated individuals, all else being equal.

Looking at evidence that shows your demographic has 1/50 of the risk and then accepting that your risk is 1/50 is not the same as feeling invulnerable. It's a clear-eyed data-based assessment, while your retort is an age-based stereotype.

Most people don't have the ability to avoid all risk or cloister themselves away indefinitely, so real risk assessments matter. For them vague catastrophizing based on fear can easily be either harmful or useless. They've got to go out and work as nurses or line cooks and it matters if their risk of death is 1%, 0.1%, or 0.01%.

It's super creepy that the age-based shaming is actually ratcheting up as vaccines are deployed preferentially to older demographics, but sadly not surprising. Is there an Onion article about this yet? Politician shocked that unvaccinated cohorts get infected more frequently?

I see that less than half as many 18-29 year olds are now hospitalised as in December. That the drop was faster among older people is down to vaccines as you say, but also irrelevant. And the rate of hospitalisation amongst older people is still more than 5.5x as high.

I have no idea how you think this data supports any argument you are trying to make.

But then why sacrifice youth for old age? That’s what everyone has been asked to do for more than a year now.

A year of your 20s or 30s is worth more than a year of your 70s or 80s, and probably several times more.

^ I don’t think I sacrificed much. I prefer pre-pandemic life, but I know that many, many others have had it worse

I just went on a great drive today, I sure as hell am not exactly suffering

Cloistering right now, in the US, Canada and the UK should be unnecessary. As I've said, I'm for taking all restrictions off individual outdoor activity. whether dining or sports or whatever (spectator sports and entertainment in outdoor venues with crowds excepted).

I think vaccinated people and the young who want to take the chance can do things like shopping, even in malls and so on but they should wear masks and avoid crowds. I think the riskiest places are bars and pubs and those should not be allowed to serve indoors. If we are going to have outdoor crowds at sports and concert activities, they should be distanced (unrelated people sitting 6 ft apart).

The shaming is largely because irresponsible people, mostly but not exclusively young, are just behaving badly IMHO with their scenes like in Miami for Spring Break (so far no videos posted of last night's Arizona women's Final Four victory celebration but I'm going to bet it was ugly). Sitting on the beach, swimming, beach volleyball, relaxed fun in the sun and even outdoor drinking with a few friends isn't enough--they have to pack as many people into small spaces, unmasked, as they can and get rowdy. That should be shamed IMHO.

There's no getting around the fact that neither the young nor many of the old are isolated in our society and if they are passing around the virus among each other, it's going to spread to the rest of us. All anybody has to do right now is wear a mask indoors, maintain some distance from strangers outdoors and get vaccinated when you can.. Local governments should, IMHO keep the riskiest, least essential venues like indoor drinking establishments closed for now (but probably only for a another month or two--until everybody they can induce to get vaccinated has had a chance). It's spring so outdoor drinking and dining should work again. Gyms can probably reopen with care--keep people distanced and make them wear masks if they are within 15 feet or so of each other and the ventilation isn't exceptional for an indoor space (sorry about that, but you exhale far more aerosols exercising than resting and you need to wear a mask if doing it indoors even though you hate it).

I look at what past generations endured--war, depression and so on--and I just can't get too worked up about the "suffering" of today's 18-39 year olds. Just do what you should do and not what you want to do for once.

^ THIS ISN’T A FUCKING WAR.

That needs to be repeated again and again. It’s a virus that is a fair bit worse than flu but with a still quite low fatality rate in the grand scheme of things, and for which the risk is generally (albeit not completely) limited to certain groups who should be taking additional precautions.

You see it as you want to see it--as allows you to selfishly ignore it. It has killed more Americans than our wars have: 554,000 vs 25,000 in the Revolutionary War, 116,000 in WW I, 405,000 in WW II, 36,500 in the Korean War, 58,000 in Vietnam. Only the Civil War had more casualties (655,000) and that number will probably be surpassed before COVID is history.

Flu kills more Americans than Vietnam or Korea over the same time period. And the pre-Revolutionary population of the US was what, 5-10 million? What’s your point?

About 650,000 Americans die every year from heart disease. Is McDonald’s our enemy in a war? We should be talking about obesity not Covid.

Yeah, and I’ve improved my situation by going to Miami. Otherwise, speak for yourself. Plus, no offense, but you’re a middle aged guy in the suburbs with kids, and that’s a group that generally seems to feel pretty ok about all of this based on my anecdotal observations. The more one’s normal life differs from lockdown life, the more burdensome it has been. You also earn a living, as I understand it, from things that have been less affected whereas my business has been badly affected.