Numbers like 0.5% sound small as an abstract concept, but 0.5% of the US population is still 1.6M ppl. That’s a lot!
The other is peoples social networks tend to skew towards their own age group. But not exclusively. So older people have networks with lots of other old people. Which reminds me I showed up in San Francisco in the mid 90's. I missed the HIV carnage of the 80's. But I have gay friends who are my friends because HIV killed most of their friends and they had to start over.
I challenge you to quote the portion of my comment where I said anything resembling this.
I stated facts about IFR and its strong age-dependence. I made no judgments about what policies we should pursue based on these facts.
Note I am not pushing for just letting go. But I do feel efforts could be made that are more targeted to the vulnerable population.
Source? Your link only has CFR (and >10%).
In my country's (CFR ~15%) antibody study (reminder: preliminary data) the IFR is ~1.5%. Both pretty close to initial estimates.
> heavily skewed to the oldest members of the population
And?
Either way: the huge influx of patients completely collapsed the healthcare system, which made it harder to treat everyone else.
That said, I think the natural next step for this argument is targeted testing at younger populations to see what their IFR is. With stronger (read: expensive) measures to isolate long term care facilities. Occupants, care givers, cooks, cleaners, all. (If the immunity antibody story plays out, work on ways to get antibody positive people in those positions.)
And I will again point out. I'm a random internet poster. No, nobody should do something just because I think it makes sense. :)
The link I provided has IFR, and is where I got the NYC numbers I quoted. They’re in the bar graph, expressed as rates per 100k.
The best reference I know of for a global, age-adjusted IFR as of early April is here (their estimate is 0.66%):
https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laninf/PIIS1473-3099...
However, more recent papers have come out, suggesting much lower values. For example, this paper estimates a a value of 0.08% for patients under 70, using antibody data in blood donors in Denmark:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20075291v...
My stated estimate is conservative. If anything we are continually reducing the number as we gather more data on prevalence. Regardless, a range of 0.5-1% is a safe bound for the highest quality estimates of IFR. The values cited by the OP (>>1.5%) are far too high, and based on severity-biased samples were gathered early in the pandemic.
AFAICT that's per 100k total population, not per 100k infected (which amounts to 0.2% total FR citywide, not even IFR).
Or am I missing the graph you mean?
> The values cited by the OP (>>1.5%) are far too high, and based on severity-biased samples were gathered early in the pandemic.
I am OP. They're based on an antibody study currently ongoing in my country so... no, they're not far too high nor severity-biased. (I'm trying to find links in English, but no luck so far).
For younger people, the risk of death is quite low. In NYC, for example, IFR from ages 0-17 is 0, and for 18-44 is 0.019%. The hospitalization rates for those two age brackets are 0.02% and 0.2%, respectively.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page