The argument we all bought back in March–remember March?–was that a two week break in normal social and employment circulation would help to get the hospitals time to get ready for the flood of cases, both by cancelling existing scheduled medical work, and by getting PPE and ventilators (remember ventilators, which we were told were essential to people’s hopes of not dying, and which turned out to be death machines?).
Well, that time period came and went. The hospitals told the people who were going to get cancer screenings, and stress tests for their hearts, and hip and knee replacements, and a host of other things: sorry buddy, but the wave is coming. Don’t know when we will be back.
Then nothing. Nothing. Half empty hospitals. Cheating by miscoding cases as COVID so as to defray the holding cost of large numbers of empty beds and laid off healthcare workers.
But who DID show up in the hospitals? Old people. Look at that chart. Scroll over it to get the meaning of the lines. The hospitalization rate for the Over 65 is presently 301 per 100,000 population.
.
For 50-64 it is 151, which is half that.
For 18-49–which includes college age kids, certainly, it is 60.
And for 0-17 I’ll call the average 5.
Here is my point: not only is there a quantum leap from the category Over 55 to Under 55 in DEATHS, there is also a quantum leap in HOSPITALIZATIONS.
So if we just opened up the gates to the young, the hospitals would not overflow. No doubt some would be hospitalized, some may even die, just as some people die every year from vaccinations, or infections in hospitals, or medical malpractice. But opening up would quickly be good for 99% of us.
There is no excuse to continue this shut down for the under 55. No reason for masks, no reason to ban mass gatherings.
And every reason to encourage people to live healthy lives, to get enough sun, to take Vitamin D, to exercise, and to lose weight if they carry too much.