Pre-COVID epidemiological wisdom: “For pathogens that inflict greater morbidity at older ages, interventions that reduce but do not eliminate exposure can paradoxically increase the number of cases of severe disease by shifting the burden of infection toward older individuals.”
In other words, efforts to lower transmission in everyone can render older people more susceptible.
It is intuitively obvious, is the fundamental concept behind the GBD, and has been formalized mathematically:
A simple SIR-like epidemic model integrating known age-contact patterns for the United States to model the effect of age-targeted mitigation strategies for a COVID-19-like epidemic. The model finds that, among strategies which end with population immunity, strict age-targeted mitigation strategies have the potential to greatly reduce mortalities and ICU utilization for natural parameter choices.
The question that is never asked that must be asked: Why take measures to mitigate the spread of a virus which is innocuous to all but a tiny minority, and thereby actually increase the risk to that tiny minority?
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