> Since top comments here are anecdata about how terrible covid is for a young person, just thought I'd share my experience. ... We don't want to paint our picture of the situation using only extremes. How about we include the "average" anecdata too?
The reason for those anecdotes is to counter the false narrative that young people are basically invulnerable to Covid, and should therefore live like it doesn't exist. That false narrative has been quite prevalent, even here, as an oblique way of arguing against public health measures.
There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered.
> There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered.
Maybe not on HN, but if you talk to regular people that get their news from newspaper or cable news, they tend to be very misinformed about Covid-19’s severity and prevalence.
A poll done in the UK found that people, on average, thought Covid-19 deaths were 100 times more numerous than they actually are.
Nobody is invulnerable to anything. But we should never make generalized/universal policies to the detriment of the masses motivated by long-tail extremes. Just because we don't know how to reliably measure the (real and large) impact of mitigations, doesn't mean we can/should pretent that impact doesn't exist. It's all about tradeoffs. And I'm tired of emotional heart-strings cases that are "easy" to measure stamping out all the real effects of mitigations that are "hard" to measure. And I've also heard way too much about, "but if we could have responded effectively/quickly like China/Vietnam/New Zealand then we wouldn't have been _forced_ to do these other damaging mitigations" - that is a theoretical idea/world that we don't live in. Given the actual situation - that we live in a country with free-spirited/selfish people with pretty significant individual liberties, how should we address the virus? That is the real question.
> 1700 people under the age of 35 have died in the USA. Let that sink in. Out of EVERYONE in this country, only 1700 have died under 35
That's the wrong way to look at it. How many people over 35 in the USA have died or was hospitalized because an under-35 was a link in the transmission chain? How many people under 35 have expereinced short or long term medical harm because of an infection that didn't manage to kill them?
The reason for those anecdotes is to counter the false narrative that young people are basically invulnerable to Covid, and should therefore live like it doesn't exist. That false narrative has been quite prevalent, even here, as an oblique way of arguing against public health measures.
There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered.