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Originally Posted by russellw
Veritable little ray of sunshine aren't you.
If we go back a to my grandparents generation, those who retired at 65 generally didn't outlive a new car with the average life expectancy for males around 70.2 in 1960. We've added 13 years to that in my lifetime (82.9) and it should be noted that whole of pandemic in Australia (including pre-vax), only 10% of deaths have been in the 60-69 age group while the over 80's make up 57.7% of all COVID deaths. Indeed, 9.5% of all COVID deaths in this country are below 60 so the chances are about the same for the 60-69 age group with the sub-60's and 80+ groups having a greater chance of being road fatalities.
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Just being realistic. Can the statistics of the past two years be used to presume how things will play out once it becomes endemic? I'm not so sure that they can, we're following a different strategy now. The 80s+ were hit hard because it got into aged care facilities and ripped through. Everyone else had protection because we locked down hard and our hospital systems weren't overrun, but we're not locking down anymore. It will rip through the entirely of the population so it will be interesting to see if the statistics and age groups change, moving forward. It will also be interesting to see if that life expectancy creeps backwards. Our future is going to look a lot different to how we probably expected it would be.
I'm pretty salty at the moment. One of the deaths from a couple of days ago was a woman with dementia who couldn't make her own medical decisions so her kids had EPOA, but they were antivaxxers and refused to give permission for her to receive a vaccine when she was eligible. She was a nice lady and she died because of someone else's stupidity. There's probably a lesson there for the rest of us to be very sure about who we pick as our enduring power of attorney...
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Originally Posted by BENT_8
From a Government perspective it is the perfect assassin, picks off the unhealthy who are a drain on the health system and the elderly who are a drain on the welfare system.
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Unfortunately I think you're probably right.