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| My charts from news reports today. The charts look just like the charts back in March 2020 |
Median age of deaths from Covid in Hong Kong: 84. Average life expectancy in Hong Kong: 84.
Percentage deaths in people who are unvaccinated : 81%.
Vaccinated death rates, all ages: .03%. Over 80: 0.27%. Unvaccinated death rates all ages: 0.27%. Over 80: 4.34%. IOW: unvaccinated are 9 times (all ages) to 16 times (over 80) more likely to die from or with Covid.
If people say “all deaths are a tragedy” and don’t make any distinction between young and old, that’s not the way people have always treated deaths. Take a funeral for an 85 year old and the eulogies will all be about the life lived and contributions made. I know first hand recently: two friends and colleagues, in their 70s, died of Covid. All the talk was of what they’d done and the wonderful lives they’d lived. The atmosphere at their cyber-funerals was celebratory.
Or take a funeral of a 5 or 8 year old, and the grief is much greater, palpable, the loss of potential, the horror, tragedy of a tiny coffin.
So in practice and culturally, we do treat deaths differently depending on age, and always have. And I say that as a someone on the right hand side of those charts above. Over 70, with comorbidities.
Yet we treat all deaths equally in the case of Covid. The infamous attacks on people for “wanting to kill grannie” if they expressed some doubts about the efficacy of lockdowns, are testament to that.
We here in Hong Kong -- and the world generally -- treated every death the same. A kind of cognitive dissonance. Which led to massive and harmful lockdowns. Punishing the young and healthy to save the sick and elderly. That’s not the way we’ve usually done things.
We’re still at here in Hong Kong. About to lockdown. Again. Like two years ago.
The source of the above charts is my spreadsheet on Excel, here, based on data that just came out today.
