The surrealism of everyday life

[Orik]

Guy's Grocery Games called.

[prasantrin]

He did get 5 free passes to use anytime in the future, as well as a refund for that one meal. But it was hard trying to get through the rest of the trip, especially since the two young'uns were in fine form, and just wanted to go on more rides.

 

It was the ground beef, by the way. The adults didn't even order the same dish, but they each had a dish that contained ground beef 

[The Flon]

On 12/2/2020 at 9:09 PM, Orik said:

Guy's Grocery Games called.

GO ON...

[voyager]

I do find it totally unfathomable that political consensus is that we prioritize the uber-elderly for Covid vaccine.   I recall a conversation with a new GP many years ago.   He was inquiring about my family history re heart, cancer, diabetes, et al, "Oh, yes," I tell him, "all of those!"    "Oh, my!   At what age?"   So I recite a range from mid 80s on.   He replies, "They didn't die from any of those.  They died of old age!"    So why do we celebrate blowing precious vaccine on a population that will reap such limited benefit?    And, yes, I'm close enough to this demographic to be objective.

[Anthony Bonner]

Because the years lost math says we should?

[Josh Karpf]

We might as well keep more old people alive because even before the pandemic, land devoted to agriculture had declined, so we don’t really need them to help fertilize the soil.

[small h]

2 hours ago, voyager said:

So why do we celebrate blowing precious vaccine on a population that will reap such limited benefit?  

They vote a lot. That's not why we celebrate it, but that's probably why it is.

[Anthony Bonner]

There is literally a way the epidemiologists figure this out.  

[Wilfrid]

I don't know the numbers, but intuitively Bonner is surely right. It's a utilitarian calculation. Better to reward 100 people with 5 extra years of life each than 10 people with 45 years.

 

[Anthony Bonner]

life expectancy of a 90 year old woman is 5 more years and the likelihood of dying from Covid if contracted is like 15%-20%

Life expectancy of a 70 year old woman is 16 more years and the likelihood of dying if infected is 3%-4%

The real math I assume is more sophisticated, but that's kind of high level.

[Anthony Bonner]

Like there is an entire field of medical ethics/bioethics dedicated to decision making around stuff like this.  The idea this wasn't thought about (especially in countries with centralized control of the health system) is crazy.

[voyager]

1 hour ago, Wilfrid said:

I don't know the numbers, but intuitively Bonner is surely right. It's a utilitarian calculation. Better to reward 100 people with 5 extra years of life each than 10 people with 45 years.

 

It's early and before coffee, but I miss your logic.    Aren't we talking about the same 100 doses and therefore an equal number of younger people as old given the vaccine?

[Sneakeater]

It’s more like, let’s say, 500 doses.  But out of a pool of 500 potential recipients, 100 (say) would be likely to die if they caught the disease if the 500 people in the pool were all elderly, but only 10 (say) would be if the 500 people were all youthful.  So you save 50 more years (using Wilf’s numbers) by giving the 500 doses to the elderly pool.

The numbers are made up and probably exaggerated, but that’s the analysis. 

[Anthony Bonner]

and the 100*5 is greater than 10*the life expectancy of your youthful - and if you look at the actuarial tables, if 20% of the alter kockers are gonna die then you'd need 2% of the 25 year olds to die - and in this case its more .25%

[Anthony Bonner]

where it gets complicated is in the likelihood of getting infected- but for 90 year olds it tends to be very low, until its gets very very high( once the first case is found in a care facility).   Which skews the math even further towards vaccinating them first.