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Ohio lawmakers want to abolish vaccine requirements:
[...] Lawmakers are working on legislation to call off the lottery immediately. They're also trying to head off any plans for "vaccine passports." And last month, they introduced a sweeping antivaccination bill that would essentially demolish public health and vaccination requirements in the state—and not just requirements for COVID-19 vaccines, requirements for any vaccine.
[...] State Rep. Beth Liston (D-Dublin) blasted the bill, telling The Columbus Dispatch, "Not only would it prevent schools, businesses and communities from putting safety measures in pace related to COVID, it will impact the health of our children... This bill applies to all vaccines—polio, measles, meningitis, etc. If it becomes law we will see worsening measles outbreaks, meningitis in the dorms, and children once again suffering from polio."
[...] "At its core, this proposal would destroy our current public health framework that prevents outbreaks of potentially lethal diseases, threatens the stability of our economy as it recovers from a devastating pandemic and jeopardizes the way we live, learn, work and celebrate life," the letter said.
[...] "HB 248 would put all Ohioans at risk while increasing the cost of health care for families, individuals and businesses," spokesperson Dan Williamson said. "This proposal applies to all immunizations, including childhood vaccines. If passed, this legislation could reverse decades of immunity from life-threatening, but vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, hepatitis, meningitis and tuberculosis."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:00PM (4 children)
Well it's macabre, but yes - the vast majority of them were "circling the drain" so to speak. Don't forget that in the US each year about 3 million [cdc.gov] people die.
I have a simple challenge for you. Go try to find the median age of individual's who died from COVID in the US. You might find it's bizarrely hard to find, even though that is an extremely critical piece of information. Fortunately there is greater transparency in the UK and our numbers approximate theirs in this regard. The answer? 80.4 [ons.gov.uk] years old. In the United States our life expectancy (from pre-COVID times) is about 78.8 years. Obviously you don't drop dead if you're otherwise healthy after hitting 78.8 years, but 50% will have died by then, and your chances grow exponentially each year that follows. So, yes - they were "circling the drain" in general. My grandfather was one of them - 101 years old, Alzheimer's, and a man who had long since left this world, even though his body refused to go along for the longest time.
But to answer your question more directly we actually can use our numbers. [cdc.gov] The CDC does provide the death rate for the age group of 0-17 of whom your analog is appropriate for. And in a year of a plague with effectively 0 vaccines (for this age group), to say nothing of them being some of the most exposed to the virus? In this age group a total of 44,788 have died. And 300 of those deaths were attributed to COVID.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:23PM
Mandatory thoughts and prayers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Friday May 28 2021, @07:23PM
The thing is, we're all circling the drain. Some of us are a lot closer and circling faster than others, but in the long run no one here gets out alive.
Note that the mortality figures have trended younger over time. Perhaps the infirm were just the easy targets and got taken out early at a time when kids were learning at home and many parents were working from home and carefully following social isolation.
But mortality is only part of the question. The morbidity (in this case, lasting fatigue, brain fog, malaise) is also important and has affected younger people significantly.
Polio had a low mortality as well, the morbidity was the problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bethany.Saint on Friday May 28 2021, @08:06PM (1 child)
Median age doesn't mean much. Circling the drain is just plain wrong. How many years early did Covid kill is the question. Early in the epidemic here in the U.S. that figure was 9-1/2 years. For the people Covid killed it took almost 10 years off their expected lifetimes. I have no idea how this changed over time or what it is now but your looking at age alone is almost completely meaningless.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:39PM
The papers that have done this have engaged in a very disingenuous thing, whether intentionally or not. They look at the life expectancy at a given age, and simply apply that to deaths. So if somebody at e.g. 50 has a life expectancy of 40 more years and dies a death attributed to COVID then it's counted as 40 years of lost life.
It seems reasonable, but it's not because of extremely important nuance. COVID is relatively harmless for people without preexisting conditions. And these preexisting conditions are often severe - diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc. And when somebody dies of cancer but has COVID, it is counted as a COVID death. This is not to inflate the numbers but because of the inverse of what I said. COVID is brutal on folks with major preexisting conditions and so even if the cancer is what "really" killed them, it's entirely possible that COVID may have accelerated the death.
Anyhow, the point of this is that you need to account for present health status when measuring years of life lost. A 50 year old with diabetes and terminal cancer who's death is marked as a COVID death, has a rather dramatically different life expectancy than a 50 year old in good health. Because of the nature of COVID (minimal effect on healthy, relatively severe effects on unhealthy) this is an extreme bias that renders these sort of studies on years of life lost not only meaningless but grossly misleading.