But if the UK government can managed to isolate elder people, and can get those 40M to contain almost exclusively younger people, won't the fatality rate be far lesser?
Possibly, the isolation is not going to be purely age based, but young people that are more susceptible to the disease might be isolated, in that case the fatality rate could drop significantly.
The problem is that in many cases it's hard to know whether you're susceptible until it's too late. It can be an undiagnosed pre-existing condition, or caused by stress (e.g. due to the crisis itself). For many working adults it might not be easy choice to self isolate (must provide for family etc) so many might likely downplay their susceptibility.
And this is all just talking about fatality rate while hospitals still function normally.
You also have to isolate young people with preexisting comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and oncological diseases.
There is also no guarantee that the immunity will last. You can catch common cold (which incidentally is also caused by a coronavirus) multiple times. We don't know if that's true for Covid-19 as well.
This is starting to look like a form of eugenics where the old and weak are simply left to die.
It has been studied and determined most people cannot catch the same cold virus again within a short-medium time frame.
1) Fatality rate is based on hospital care being available for people who do get sick. This will include some nonzero percentage of otherwise healthy young people. Some of these patients will need advanced support, including ventilators.
2) Assuming you could contain to 40M young people (likely impossible), if even .5% of them need hospitalization, the UK hospital system will be overrun. (Not even accounting for all the other people who need hospitalization.)
3) Therefore: the low fatality rate assumption in #1 would likely not hold.
TL;DR; the absolute numbers are too big relative to health system capacity.
- Google the # of hospital beds in the UK
- Google the # of ventilators in the UK
- Pick your own fraction as to how many are currently available
- pick your own fraction of 40mm that will require hospitalization
- pick your own fraction of 40mm that will require ventilation
- Make your assumptions fit the # of hospital beds and ventilators
I haven't done all the arithmetic, but my gut says you will end up assuming that people in the "young" bucket are all essentially immune to severe forms of the disease. This is at odds with evidence in e.g. France, which would indicate a problem with your assumptions.
Sorry, where do you see that in [0]? Table 3 has a pneumonia diagnosis but isn’t broken down by age, Table 1 is broken down (somewhat) by age but only differentiates between nonsevere and severe “disease”?
If you look in methodology (search for severity), severity is defined by severity of the pneumonia according to American criteria. So these columns refer to how bad the pneumonia is.
Well, good luck?