Except for the ones that will end up fighting the worst illness in their lifetime. It may not be them but their parents or grandparents.
If you are diagnosed with covid you have a pretty high chance of being dead before a month has passed.
I think because of the early cohort in Japan, of which most 70+ people ended up deceased.
Covid is simultaneously currently worse than the flu, but on the order of genuine avoidable human suffering it SHOULD have (and should still) be treated rationally: isolating and protecting the most vulnerable, practicing good hygiene, a moment to reflect on our lifestyles, policies and our self imposed diseases that make us more vulnerable to the virus. It has a mortality function that, statistically, correlates most strongly with a person's already existing X year survival probability. If you plotted out the frequency of ages and deaths over time, it would primarily register as a small blip/compressing of deaths primarily amongst the older.
People who go off on the other end of the spectrum: that this should be the end of society/ socialising, commerce/trade and public life, are just as ridiculous and irresponsible as those who think nothing should be fine, because they illicit fear, partisanship, and stop our finite resources being spent where they do most good, not to mention the harm that's going to come from all the poorly targeted reactions.
In this case it's an opportunity to drop the hyperbole and rationally visit how we deal with healthcare and end of life, because how we deal with the elderly already, especially our experiences with those illnesses I mentioned, are qualitatively worse than the experience of dying relatively quickly from covid, but we accept it because it was "part of the everyday" (or in a lot of societies, deliberately excluded from the everyday so we don't think about it too much).
The actual reality is that one side wants people to wear masks and gradually open up in a safe manner because other places that opened up irresponsibly were hit by a second wave of infections. The other side takes mask wearing as fascism and will do literally everything in their power to harass people who wear masks or attempt to bypass the requirement for the sake of making themselves feel better. You calling COVID19 a cakewake is irresponsible hyperbole in itself considering it is dangerous and we should not be under any delusion that it is not. But it is manageable if people don't operate under delusion.
> If you plotted out the frequency of ages and deaths over time, it would primarily register as a small blip/compressing of deaths primarily amongst the older.
is not strictly true. In certain regions, NYC as an example[1], you have to look at excess mortality, or the number of deaths that are in excess of expectations given a periodic seasonal model. In some areas the number is much, much higher than normal. It's not enough to read off the reported deaths because there are many more that are attributed to other causes.
Indefinite chaining area of effect vs just area of effect roughly.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_papillomavirus_infection
Also there are other viruses that also cause cancer
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus#Cancer
So you very well could have a cancer patient coughing on you and giving you cancer but the underlying cause is the virus that they have (that caused their cancer) rather than the cancer itself. So you have chaining of cancer (albeit via a virus).
"The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer estimated that in 2002, infection caused 17.8% of human cancers"