Question: This may sound callous, but are we really upending our children’s education, the employment of thousands upon thousands, and the health of our entire economy to save the elderly? Dying is the only guarantee of old age. And dying from a respiratory illness has always been one of the most common ways old people finally succumb.

Answer: I appreciate the honest question. And I ran some numbers (see chart below). What I want us all to remember is that while COVID-19 hits the elderly the hardest, it still brings morbidity and mortality to other age groups. If the epidemic goes unabated, we could expect to see 2.27 million deaths, of whom 859,000 deaths will be to folks <70. If you’re wondering how these numbers compare with other deaths, CDC lists mortality rates for US population, including by cause. In 2017, the US experienced 2.81 million deaths TOTAL, of which 55,672 were due to influenza and pneumonia. COVID-19 poses a MUCH greater risk to the whole population, not just the elderly. Moreover, if our health system breaks, we will see higher mortality from all other causes due to poorer health care leading to poorer health outcomes. If you don’t believe my numbers (again, all assumptions-based and you can change the assumptions), you may want to check data from disease modeling experts, who show that “In an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict.