
113-year-old coronavirus survivor: The elderly are the forgotten ones of society - lkrubner
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/worlds-oldest-coronavirus-survivor-the-elderly-are-the-forgotten-ones-of-society
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mydongle
I don't know, something inside me cringes when someone who is able to live all
the way to 113 is waving their finger calling for a revolution to treat the
elderly better, when the average young person growing up today will be lucky
to even live to 70 without some kind of debt forcing them to slave away until
the day they kill themselves from depression and loneliness in a rotting
society or die from a curable/preventable illness without affordable
healthcare.

And it's not like I have no sympathy for the elderly as a young person. I just
can't hear these complaints over the cries of all the young people with no
hope, no future, who have no power to change a damn thing. If anything, the
fact that these people are able to live past 100 says something positive about
our world today, rather than that they've been forgotten or neglected in some
way.

Anyone want to tell me I'm wrong? Am I the asshole here?

------
ncmncm
In the US, it is considered normal for ~100,000 people to die each week. So,
the 100,000 coronavirus deaths we have had so far, spread over 10 weeks, have
increased numbers less than 10%. Less, because an unknown but probably non-
negligible fraction of those would have died from other cause in those ten
weeks, because of the age-linked risk. (Traffic deaths from extreme reckless
driving are _way_ up despite, or maybe because of, half the traffic
evaporating.)

I wonder if this experience will make us more conscious of the much larger
number of unnecessarily early deaths we have all the time, and maybe motivate
doing something about them.

~~~
robocat
The “they were going to die soon anyway” meme is a massively incorrect
misconception.

Expected years of life lost for Covid victims is over a _decade_ [1]. Plenty
of those that die had comorbidities, but they are often chronic conditions,
not “die this month“ conditions. The thing to remember is that the expected
lifespan for an older person is a decade more or less, because they have
already reached an old age e.g. 50% of 70 year olds are expected to live to
85[2].

[1]
[https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75](https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75)

[2]
[https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html)

