One perspective is that people are tired of getting the short end of the stick. Yet again the young incur an outsized proportion of the cost while the old reap an outsized proportion of the benefit.
You aren't thinking of second-order effects.
In such a situation, old people are going to effectively be left to die, and it'll be younger people who are more likely to survive (which they are anyway, simply by virtue of being young).
The only old people that are likely to benefit are those who manage to live long enough in isolation to not get infected before a vaccine or effective treatment becomes widely available... which could take a long time.
if you come in messed up from a car accident and you need 5 doctors to survive, or those 5 doctors can keep 5 covid patients alive each, you’re going to be left to bleed out. regardless of how young you are.
(i’m not claiming those relative numbers are realistic.)
An unaddressed gap is medical staff on the pandemic front lines without adequate PPE are still shackled by these rules made for a system that is not overwhelmed by a pandemic. These need to be waived for the duration of the emergency.
As with such trolley problems, real life is rarely so clear-cut. If done intelligently, massive loss of life can be prevented, and the economy can find smart ways to adapt.
Either way, we may be looking at an economic depression the likes of which hasn't been seen for a hundred years.
Unfortunately, the current government is very unlikely to offer a New Deal to get us out of it, and it remains to be seen what the voters who survive this pandemic will do about it.
An overwhelmed health care system and lack of medicines and medical supplies is likely to cause even more deaths.
That's not to mention other possible deaths due to the ensuing chaos and social and economic disruption brought about by the above deaths, global political instability, and reduced supply and demand from the rest of the world as it battles this pandemic.
How many people will die from climate change? It really feels like unless it is an uncontrolled threat to baby boomers we will not take action on it.
400K people die from smoking related illnesses, as a result of consuming something they knew would do that to them. What we outlawed was second-hand smoke, where we prevented innumerable deaths of people who didn't get to choose whether they smoked: at bars, at restaurants, at casinos, on airplanes. That is a fair place to draw the line. If you want to kill yourself smoking, you know the risks, and so long as you're not impacting anyone else, have at it.
> How about sugar to prevent obesity related illnesses?
As in this case a debate should be had: personal liberty vs. companies who know they're selling a harmful product. The right place to draw the line could easily be to outlaw advertising of sugar-added products to children.
> I think these measure are reasonable, I think allowing other such stupid things is unreasonable.
Not going out to the detriment of others is far closer to second-hand smoking than to first-hand smoking so I'd wager an entire couple of decades of case law and precedent exists.
> How many people will die from climate change? It really feels like unless it is an uncontrolled threat to baby boomers we will not take action on it.
Boomers represent 22% of the US population as of 2018, and obviously, falling. If I remember my math right, democracy gives the youth a pretty big edge so they can't really pin this one on the boomers anymore.
It's true, but it has zero relevance to the fact that people are naturally resistant to being told to make huge sacrifices almost solely for the benefit of another group of people. Particularly at a time when one of the major (pre-coronavirus) world storylines is around the first group of people suffering from the climate decisions made by the older group.
The older generation also solved a lot of problems, and gave us great gifts, as did every generation before them, and as we will for the ones that follow us.
It's not productive to try to pit the young against the old, and the GP is right to point out that you too will be old one day, if you're lucky, so it's certainly unwise to reform the system so that it discriminates against the very group you should hope to join someday (and sooner than you would imagine, sooner than anyone wishes), especially considering the alternative.
^This matters because it shows that the government is capable of taking dramatic action
Be sure to tell grandma how much you care, junior.
> But where is the help for those that now can't pay their rent or buy enough food?
Folks in California are eligible for up to $1800/month in unemployment benefits.
> That situation inherently breeds resentment at a time where resentment is already a mainstream topic.
Response to a disaster should breed solidarity.
This has gotta be the most nihilistic thing I've ever read. And I spend time on Reddit.
The ascendance of humanity is due to a) our brains, and b) our aggregating into communities and working for collective benefit. Our entire existence disproves your hyper-libertarian/utilitarian notion.
Then again, clearly some people hold this perverse idea... which explains the random edge lords on Twitter bragging about violating social distancing protocols.