Baseball shutting down

[oldjudge]

Originally Posted by h2oya311

It's about the danger to those who are high risk, like the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions. The death rates for those groups are very high. While you may be fine, you can still be a disease carrier/spreader. If the hospitals get inundated with multiple patients at the same time, this becomes a much bigger moral dilemma (like who gets to have the life saving ventilator over someone else). Canceling large events like this buys time for health care providers and vaccine producers. Italy is in deep for these very reasons.

It’s not solely old people with preexisting conditions who die from the virus. The doctor in China who discovered the virus and treated early patients died from it, and he was in his 30’s. The mortality rate for people catching the virus appears to be between 1-3%, depending on which stats you read, but that is not uniform across all age groups. Very few young health people currently die from it, which implies the percentage of older people who die from it is a lot higher.