Dunno what this refers to Bob. I believe most of this was to set up a hypothetical use of scarce resources scenario.
High 600,000s range in U.S., tens of millions worldwide. Here, you agree with the criteria that I mentioned as implied by your previous post. To use less emotional language, these younger victims had more years of life ahead of them, and on average a better quality of life.
I don't know whose concern it is that "this is not the worst crisis in US history." It's not mine, as you're talking about something I never said.
I will, however, caution you that, unlike the so-called Spanish Flu and the world wars, this crisis is ongoing -- from all indications, only beginning.
It has the potential to be very significant. If you ran projections based on known data using a monte carlo random walk simulation, modeling all the available data, I don't know where the fat part of the histogram would be (how many scenarios end with how many deaths.) I don't know where in the histogram, say, 1 million deaths would fall. I don't know where 5 million deaths would fall. I don't think you do.
I am of course disregarding any access that you have to the magic 8 ball.
By the way, our impacts from each of the world wars pales in comparisons with some nations. The impact of the so-called Spanish Flu in the US is surpassable by this virus. I am not rooting for it.
So all that said, whether we're at the outset of "the worst crisis in U.S. history"... well, that's nothing that
I said, but the wheel's still in spin.
Did I neglect to say that the 20 YO and the 60 YO are both in need of a ventilator? If I did not stipulate that, I think it is certainly within my rights to assume that you could infer it from the setup, you have 1 ventilator and a 20 YO and a 60 YO. To clarify, I did not mean that the 20 YO had the sniffles and the 60 YO's lungs were turning to concrete.
The link above says what the treatments
include. Perhaps for your benefit, they should use the legalistic "but are not limited to." They curiously leave out the treatment for severe cases: Intubation and ventilation. The scenario was not meant to address how to decide the allocation of one scarce resource to 2 people, neither of whom had a need for the scarce resource in question.
Okayyyyy, and I never asserted that it was. As you'll read above, however, call me when this crisis is over for your victory lap over whoever
did say that.
This response at least tells me that you indeed are using the metric of years of healthy life, i.e., years of life x quality of life. Just like Zeke Emmanuel, except that he included a lottery aspect so that hope was not foreclosed on the older and less healthy. But you're less sentimental, that's defensible.
I saw one stat that the average age at death in Italy is 81 - so I assume that's where you get yours, above. I'm a little skeptical of their data right now, having seen that 99% of Italians really had something else this morning [sic].
It's actually hard to find the "average age at death" stat. Most stat breakdowns are what percentage of each group die. However, I find an average age of 81 difficult to square with some of the info here regarding percentage of each cohort dying.
New analysis of coronavirus risk: Young adults are not invincible - STAT
All quibbles aside, we're both aware now that you are using years of life x quality of life metric like Zeke Emmanuel suggested a little more than a decade ago (in combination with a hope-preserving lottery) when he wrote about the ethics of such decisions involving scarce medical resources.
Oh, certainly. But the difficulty, you see, is that the state's purpose is to protect and serve the needs of its citizens, not vice versa.
That said, it is absolutely defensible to accord scarce resources to the younger, if all else is equal, when both an older and a younger person need said resources. My entire post was agreeing with that point. However, this "Pffft, it only kills old people" riff continues to annoy me. Not make me anxious, annoy me.
The key is, your attitude
could lead to minimization of the deaths of older people. Your further utilitarian rationalization (society's use for the candidates, rather than
just years and quality of life) could be applied to those on state assistance, the mentally infirm, people who you disagree with, members of unpopular religions, and so on.
It is
very rare that we find ourselves faced with these scarce-resource decisions in a wholesale fashion. I agree that your "death panel" would choose correctly in giving the vent to the younger candidate (and disagree with your attempt to assert that the Mayo Clinic would send everybody home no matter the scenario and refuse any use of a ventilator to any candidate).
Given your bizarre need to put assertions in my mouth that I never said -- that this would be the worst event in U.S. History or something? -- I think that's more your problem than mine.
Thanks for playing.
