Of course it matters. If a disease is not particularly dangerous to a certain demographic, then that demographic by definition cannot overwhelm scarce ICU resources.
Not true at all. If 0.2% of Americans between the age of 15 and 55 want to go to hospital before they die of coronavirus, that's 350,000 people. In the entire country there are about 800,000 hospital beds - of which maybe 45,000 are ICU beds. And those hospitals aren't sitting there empty waiting for coronavirus patients to arrive, they average 2/3 beds in use. So, even if we pretend that the hospitalization rate is as low as the fatality rate, and they just need to be inside a hospital and not inside the ICU, we are already short by 100,000 beds. Sounds like overwhelmed to me.
The case fatality rate is the number of deaths divided by the number of known cases (positive tests).
What you are looking for is the IFR (infection fatality rate) which is not known, because of the number of infections in the 10-19 population which were asymptomatic or too mild to be tested.
It’s extremely telling, for example, that 99.9% of fatalities in Italy as of two days ago were 50+. Surely that is not because no one under 50 was infected, particularly since the younger population is more likely to be congregating at bars and clubs.
I’m happy to throw away karma to call out anyone multiplying a naive CFR by a population number every time. It’s totally incorrect to do that.
The point of my post was to point out that the number of deaths for people under 20 is not zero, that is all. We can debate what the true rate is, but I think we can at least agree it’s >0
