[TopHand]

Your right, we should ignore statistical evidence and go with your wife's anecdotal evidence. Your also right about letting the experts run our lives. After all they know far more about how the world works than we could ever know and we should just buckle down and do the menial tasks we're good at and let the experts take care of us.

[markbnj]

>> Your right, we should ignore statistical evidence and go with your wife's anecdotal evidence.

I didn't offer anecdotal "evidence" of anything. I told a story from a professional who is on the front lines of this fight to illustrate that the numbers of people who die don't make it clear where the pressures on the medical system come from. They come from people needing care, whether or not they die. In fact whether they eventually die probably has little impact on the overall system load. If your statistical evidence, which is really just the odd bits of studies and reports you probably don't fully understand, disagrees with practitioner experience then it's probably wrong.

[TopHand]

From wikipedia- anecdotal evidence is evidence collected in a casual or informal manner and relying heavily or entirely on personal testimony. The third paragraph presents as if you are trying to dispute the statistical evidence that has been accumulated with anecdotal or personal testimony.

[markbnj]

I appreciate your clarification, but no that is not what I was trying to do. My intent, as already mentioned, was to highlight that the mortality rate among various categories of people doesn't tell the whole story.

[ugexe]

What non-menial task has this situation stolen from you that is also more important than solving the current medical crisis?

[TopHand]

Two months ago we were being told the most important problem that needed immediate resolution was planetary climate change. We needed to rely on experts for that one too. It also didn't matter what costs the industrial world would have to pay. It needed resolution. Actually if climate change is the problem the experts claim it is, I would put that one above the current medical crisis. It effects all life on the planet, not just a certain subset of mammals. In six months the crisis du jour will be the economy. Of course the experts will be sure to tell us how we must change our lives to survive that. After that we'll have an environmental crisis because 3 to 4 billion starving humans will wreck havoc on the Eco-systems they live in.