[ravenstine]

That's not how anyone should assess risk. You can't take an average and assume that it applies to everyone. The elderly hare far more likely of losing 10 years off their lives than young people who are very unlikely to lose 40+ years off their lives. For instance, the chance that I will die from COVID at my age and health are, for all intents and purposes, 0%, according to the CDC. It would be ridiculous for me to take a statistic that is more apt for the sick and the elderly and use that to determine the course of my life.

By the way, the truth can be very callous. I don't think it's particularly useful for you to point out how callous someone sounds on the internet unless the other person has some demonstrable intent of cruelty. We all know that we have the potential to sound like bad people through text online.

[rcpt]

The metric you're looking for is QALY "quality adjusted life year". It's studied a lot in health economics but generally disregarded wrt covid because we don't have 2060's actuarial tables yet.

Yes there is evidence that 10-30% of covid infections have not resolved at 6 months

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...

which is roughly what SARS 1 looks like (and those people are still sick). But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.

[robocat]

“A study published in the Journal of Public Health finds that for each person in the U.S. who died after contracting COVID-19, an average of nearly 10 years of life had been lost.” - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200923124557.h...

> But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.

That isn’t relevant to the 10 year statistic although it is an interesting point - you are saying the final result for years of life lost due to Covid could be a higher number than 10 years (after we get to finally tally the numbers in the decades to come as people die). Depends on how you paint your statistics I guess. [para edited to add clarity]

[robocat]

The point I made is that an average of 10+ years lost is strikingly different from the canonical “nearly dead elderly don’t matter” argument that I see far too many people use (and which my comment replied to). Obviously averages are very poor indicators when a distribution is wonky, and it is preferably to deep dive into the data.

Note I am all for people doing whatever they want with their own lives - if you want to go to a Covid party I would love to support that. I love taking certain risks myself.

However, when the choices of one age group can kill my mum, dad or friends, I would hope we agree to serious restrictions to help prevent that. With engineering balance to the compromises, given that prevention techniques cause significant human costs.

I am from New Zealand, so I can resoundingly support everyone acting together in concert to protect everyone else (as most kiwis did, with a good outcome for us).