Anything we do now to reduce the R0 of this disease will disproportionally enable people to live long enough for herd immunity to be attained, courtesy of the exponential growth curve. The amount of people that has to get sick to overwhelm hospitals is smaller than you might think. When hospitals get overwhelmed people die of other preventable cases due to reduced resources, tired physicians, lack of time to see patients at all and people being scared of even going to the hospital in the first place. Old people are not "disposable" and for younger people that happen to have the genetic (or other) predisposition to bad or fatal cases it will be hard to tell them "sucks to be you" when the preventive steps are well understood by now: interact with people as little as possible and when you do, do so outside while wearing masks.
Also, the death rate among poorer people is a multiple of that of the general population, among other reasons because they are working essential jobs to not starve. Those of us that can isolate and don't are saying that these people's lives (essential workers, including health care workers) have no value, they are just meat for the meat grinder.
You appear to have confused case fatality rate with infection fatality rate. There have been far more infections than confirmed cases because most never get tested or formally diagnosed. The actual IFR is under 1%.
That comment was meant to answer two people at once, my bad.
I was referring to the proportion of population that was not at risk. That population has an insanely small chance of having long term side effects from data I've seen. Which was the reason I'm not sure why we would force them to get these vaccines.
EDIT: To be more precise; Of course we want a vaccine and vulnerable people to get it. You'd rather risk getting whatever potential side effects of that vaccine than get covid. I'm more torn about why healthy young people should get it.
But the proportion of people who are both at risk and can't get the vaccine (and alternatives) must be small (from intuitive maths, I actually haven't looked into this).
Why would this vaccine be mandatory while plenty of other aren't? E.g. I've never got flu-tested before a concert/the flu shot, even though it could pass to other people/kill people.
I'm wondering where's the line between freedom to one own's body and other people's well being. IMO it's not as clear-cut as people make it out to be.
You've mentioned "Low risk" a few times. You're right, the risk for young people is low. That doesn't mean no-risk though. There are plenty of examples of young people suffering harm because of covid.
At the moment we think covid is at least ten times more lethal than flu. If you're comparing numbers of people killed you need to make sure you're counting death the same way, and most people aren't doing that.
It is possible, but from my understanding, a lot of diseases can have extreme cases. And even so, being free to take on that risk is what I'm refering in when I talk about one own's body.
You're missing my point. These deaths will be insanely reduced once we get the vaccine out to the people that need it. I wasn't saying they are the same; i was saying they are similar in the way they are infectuous and we don't seem to be doing much for young people for most other diseases.
I was under the impression that vaccine + immunity will just lead to herd immunity and the disease to go away on its own.