It is very misleading to imply that only old people suffer from that as there are countless stories of “I have a 35 yold friend with no pre-existing conditions who’s fighting for their lives”. If it were only old people the hospital situations would look drastically different and we wouldn’t have capacity issues. We maybe are now better at saving those people than at the start of the pandemic but we’re not perfect yet.
Hopefully the COVID pills coming out to treat it are going to meaningfully reduce the outsized burden anti-vaxx people are putting on the health care system (overwhelmingly, if not even exclusively, the people ending up in hospital due to COVID are unvaccinated)
Those stories are breathlessly reported on because they are rare, 2.4% of Covid Deaths in the US are people under the age of 40[1] which is 50% of the US population, it's harder to find data but most of them had whom had other issues or were not direct covid deaths. Covid Risk goes up orders of magnitude by age [2].
[11 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
60-69 yolds had ~2k hospitalizations last week
50-59 yolds had 1.5k hospitalizations last week
40-49 yolds had 1k hospitalizations last week
30-39 yolds had ~1k hospitalizations last week
Thus we see each age range has roughly the same number of hospitalizations. Not sure how this correlates on a per capita basis although in this case it doesn't really matter since the healthcare system is a shared resource.
Why are hospitalizations important? At this point, you dying or having complications from a failure to vaccinate is thankfully mostly your own problem since vaccinations are supremely effective at preventing this regardless of the COVID strain from the looks of it. Overwhelming the medical system and placing an undue burden on it because of refusal to vaccinate is why we're still facing lockdowns due to spikes of variants. Hopefully with the new treatment pill and evolutionary direction Omicron is taking means we're on our way out of the pandemic.
Again, focusing on the mortality when a massive problem is overwhelming our shortstaffed medical system is myopic. 25% of hospitalizations result in an ICU visit [2].
> Patients who were hospitalized more recently with COVID-19 (April to June 2021) were younger (median age of 59 compared with 68) and experienced lower in-hospital death rates (10% compared with 18%) than those who were hospitalized between January 2020 and March 2021.
This indicates the old people are smartly getting vaccinated or dying off. But again, deaths is not the primary problem the unvaccinated have at this point. Primarily they form a reservoir for the virus to mutate and put burden the health care system.
[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis... [2] https://www.cihi.ca/en/covid-19-hospitalization-and-emergenc...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
You can't say this about rare serious COVID cases but also point out that the plural of anecdote is not data when other people say similar things about rare serious vaccine side effects.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
