YLL

Why is it that most of us feel that it's a far greater tragedy when a young person, say, a 12-year old or a teenager, dies than it is when a octogenarian passes. The reason, even if we're not conscious of it, is a metric that is well know in the public health area—years of lost life (YLL).  This metric "estimates the years of potential life lost due to premature deaths. YLL takes into account the age at which deaths occur, giving greater weight to deaths at a younger age and lower weight to deaths at older age."

The calculation for YLL is somewhat more complex than my explanation, but overall, it implies that we should be very concerned when diseases attack young people, pulling out all the stops to protect them. After all, if young people die in large numbers due to some disease, the cumulative YLL is enormous. 

You'd think that public health experts like Team Apocalypse member,  Dr. Anthony Fauci, would have factored YLL into his recommendations and decision-making when early data about COVID-19 provided a strong indication that those over 80-years old in nursing homes were the most likely to die from the virus, and those who were under 25 had near zero risk of death. In fact, within a month of the first reported COVID-19-related deaths in the West, we knew that close to 40 percent of those who died fell into the 70-plus category. That number has been revised upward to just over 50 percent.

An 80+ year old in a nursing home has an average life expectancy of between 0.5 and 1.5 years (because that person invariably has health problems). Any recommended policy associated with COVID-19 should have focused on protecting the elderly, bolstering nursing home defenses and otherwise suggesting that seniors isolate themselves from the population at large. But businesses, schools, and most other activities should have gone on as normal.

Why? YLL, that's why. 

Anyone under 40 - 50 years old has a tiny probability of dying from the virus. It would have been far better to have allowed the virus to spread through that population, so that we could have achieved herd immunity more rapidly. That's essentially what Sweden did, and it worked just as well as countries that shutdown. Only one difference. Sweden didn't wreck their economy and put millions out of work. We did.

Incredibly, Joe Biden has indicated that he would again shutdown the country should COVID-19 re-emerge next winter. He blithely suggests that he'd "follow the science" (a recurrent Dem mantra). Unfortunately, the Dem members of Team Apocalypse have been doing anything but following the science since April. Their decision-making and consequent actions run counter to international public health data, to science, and to reality itself. But there has been a political purpose to it.

I wonder whether Biden's suggestion that he would shutdown the country yet again would fly if the Dems were in control. I suspect not—because the last thing they'd need is an angry public and an even more crippled economy.Their trained hamsters in the media would play along. Death scoreboards and "case" counts would magically disappear.

But Joe says he'd shut it all down. That position, in and of itself, is more than enough for any thinking person to vote against the Democratic contender. His cognitive deficit  apparently makes him unable to learn from past mistakes (and yes, the shutdown was a mistake).