Originally Posted by
Icarus2001
Gee let me think about that, no obviously. What is clearly lost on you is that choosing to get on an aircraft is vastly different to living with an endemic virus in society.
Yes, you can choose to get on an aircraft, or not. An endemic virus, on the other hand, will spread widely and infect most of the population sooner or later, without public health measures to prevent it, so whether or not you get it depends a lot on the actions of others, things such as wearing masks, social distancing, and.... vaccination, which makes it much less likely that you'll be infected. If you're not infected, you won't pass it on to others such as the older age groups or just your neighbours who you didn't realise had asthma or an underlying heart condition.
If you think it only affects the elderly though, of the 756,962 dead in the USA as of a few days ago, 49,072 were in the 45-54 year old age bracket. As you get older, the risk gets worse, but in the 55-64 year old bracket there were 107,985 deaths. Personally I don't think that 45-54 is particularly old, or someone's death in that group should be discounted because "oh, it only really affects the elderly, they were going to die anyway". Call it about 156,000 dead, aged between 45 and 64, out of the ~756,000. How many people in your airline are in that age group? This idea that "it's only serious if you're elderly and infirm" seems most often propagated by those with a financial or political interest in not taking public health measures, or an ideological issue with vaccines. There are plenty of examples of them begging for prayers on social media as they go onto a ventilator.
I certainly never said that. By the way, SPOILER ALERT, we all die in the end.
Well, in that case, I'll tell the Homicide Squad to stand down. If we're going for gross over-simplifications then any death is just an acceleration of what was going to happen anyway over a long enough timeframe.