RE: Odds and Ends — 16 June 2021

Roughly 80% of deaths are people 65 years of age and older. Many of those younger who died or became seriously ill had a complicating condition as well.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

Nothing new there. It's been well known that COVID-19 is deadliest to the particularly vulnerable. That is where the efforts should have been focused sooner and all along.

The most avoidable toll of the pandemic is economic. The poorly tailored public health measures impaired the wellbeing of all 328 million Americans, including those who got sick and those who died directly from the virus.

When your business or employer closes and you can't make a living — that makes people unwell too. It even kills some of them.

It's in these untallied costs that the pandemic is truly worse than it appears.

Unfortunately, to listen to the press it seems Americans are learning the wrong lessons from this experience. We need to stop looking at death as something to be avoided at all costs. The long term burdens on the hale and productive segments of society have actually hampered our ability, on average, to care for and protect the older and more vulnerable.

And it doesn't look like we're any more likely to make the hard decisions correctly next time either.