Where do you get that idea from? In the study it looks like everyone got better, but that may just be regression to the mean (i.e. the normal progression of covid-19 in those patients).

If you'd want to know if placebo is effective on covid-19 you'd have to do a completely different study, comparing placebo to doing nothing. Though the likelyhood that placebo therapy is "pretty effective" here is very low. Placebos usually work best in things that have a strong subjective factor, e.g. pain treatment.

The median age of the dead in Italy is 80.5 and 99.2% of them were sick, averaging 3 comorbid conditions [3]. So basically the opposite of that.

[1] https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1241741127205572609?s...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm

[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...

i.e., would the age curve be different in an ideal situation where everyone was getting optimal care, and is the statistic thus misleadingly suggesting that younger people are less at risk?

As an aside, you were certainly not being judgmental about the clinicians in Italy and I applaud you for that. Those professionals are doing incredible work in unbelievably difficult and personally dangerous situations, so I hope we can all agree not to second guess their decisions from the cheap seats.

I was trying to point out that some people using the statistics about age and mortality from Italy are trying to use them as justification for doing less to combat the disease's spread, and that might be a dangerously misleading gambit.

This is a summary of all cases in Colorado. All of our state's (small handful of) fatalities have been among residents aged 60 and over. The hospitalization rate is ~5% or so for adults in the 30-50 year old range, and it rises to about 20% in the elderly age groups.

Caveats: with only 600 cases to draw inferences from, there's a little less than one digit of precision in those estimates. Testing availability is also still somewhat limited in the state with a little more than a 10% positive rate.

I think if your population trends younger this can mean pretty high absolute numbers even if low percentages. A number of news sites in various places said the under 50 crowd is using significant portions of hospital resources.

Nationally, 12 percent of the intensive care patients were between the ages of 20 and 44.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-...

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/07/coronaviru...

https://www.statista.com/chart/21173/hospitalization-icu-adm...

> Nationally, 12 percent of the intensive care patients were between the ages of 20 and 44.

Versus 26 percent of the ICU patients being aged 45 to 54, and 62 percent of the ICU patients being 55 or older.