A stunning lack of perspective has overtaken us, will we ever recover?
The other day in one of his virus updates, President Trump mentioned something that ought to give everyone pause, but doesn't. He said the average age of death for Covid-19 fatlities is 78.
One reason it ought to generate more interest is that it just so happens that the life expectancy of an American citizen in 2020 is.....78.93 years.
How, you might ask, is the average age of death of a virus laying waste to our nation so high? We all know or have heard that Covid-19 disproportionately affects the older population, but I do not know if people truly understand how dramatic this age disparity is.
In Pennsylvania, one of our harder hit states, three times more people over one hundred years old, (114) have died than all persons under the age of forty (30). In fact more Pennsylvanian centenarians have died than people under forty-five years of age (68). Of the current Covid-19 fatalities in Pennsylvania (7,209) fully 57.3% are over eighty years old (4,136)
The Keystone state is by no means an outlier in this respect. In Massachusetts the average age of deaths is eighty-two. Persons over seventy account for an unbelievable 86.6% of all deaths in the Bay State.
Meanwhile, California which is like many states, shutting down in school learning has totally abandoned reason when it comes to "following the science." The Golden State officially has 0% deaths of anyone under the age of 18, while those over sixty-five account for fully 75% of all deaths in the state! Just a quick aside here, why is nobody making an issue of the huge disparity in the fatalities in the Hispanic communities across the nation? This is not a California thing where Hispanics represent 38% of California's population, it is manifesting itself across the country.
Pick a state and you will find that those over sixty-five, especially those citizens over eighty are by far and away more likely to succumb to the virus. It shouldn't be a surprise then, that 26% of all deaths took place in a nursing home or hospice. This percentage which does not
include other long term care facilities, will grow once New York is eventually forced to show their true nursing home fatalities, they do not count patients that are moved from the nursing facility to a hospital prior to death.
There is, a very simple reason for this. There is an explanation for why this pandemic is worse than the Hong Kong flu In 1968-69. The "Hong Kong flu" spread around the world which is estimated to have killed between one and four million globally and an estimated 100,000 in the United States. Adjusted to population growth that would be about 140,000 US fatalities today. Like Covid-19 this pandemic affected the elderly more than the general population, and for the same reason, lower immunity. That is obviously true of all diseases and illness, the old die easier.
Here is a seldom mentioned though well known component to this pandemic. In 1968 not only were there less people, there were less old people, not just overall, but as percentage of population. The median age of 1968 America was 28.1 years old, today it is 38.4. In 1968 people over sixty five, comprised 9.7% of the population, today it is 16.1%. That is an increase in the "at risk" age group of 40%. The over eighty age group has more than doubled, increasing from 1.75% of the US population in 1968 to 3.97% today. This, as shown, is reflected in the numbers. Covid-19 is and will continue to kill off Boomers, plain and simple.
Perhaps my grandparents were concerned about the Hong Kong flu, after all they had lived through the Spanish Flu of 1918, but they had also lived through the Great Depression and World War 2. Perhaps that is why they were not the worrying type. In 1968 the only thing I struggled with was puberty, the pandemic was not even on my mind, it certainly did not give me a break from school, or movies, or sports or all the other things being a kid is all about. The nightly news was the Viet Nam War not "masking up" to save humanity. Those were certainly not simpler times, they were turbulent times and in order to survive such times the most important thing a society can do is try to maintain a degree of normalcy. At this we are failing miserably. This obsession over a flu which is killing the very people who have lived out the majority of their lives and doing so while robbing peace and future prosperity from those who are just beginning life is obscene. If ten times more Boomers die of this virus, they won't, what we are doing is not worth it. Not to the future.
