People often make the claim that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have "failed to protect the elderly" While initially this was definitely true (April/March 2020), I'm not sure the claim is accurate past that 1/npic.twitter.com/bcU0KHDkDb
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8/n But that's the thing - in the very early epidemic, people did not protect the elderly However, what the evidence appears to show is that this was a relatively short-lived phenomenon
9/n While this is somewhat speculative (mostly my opinion) I think it's fair to say that after the tragedy of the early first wave, most places implemented policies that substantially reduced the number of COVID-19 infections of elderly people
10/n All over the world, people took more care with their grandparents, aged care centres curtailed visitation, and generally we were all more aware of the danger to the elderly
11/n This is seen in the numbers - many places that were hit even a few weeks later than Italy/Spain had lower infection rates in older people than younger
12/n Even within countries, I suspect there may have been an impact For example, New York had ~some~ reduction in infection in older people, but Utah had a big reductionpic.twitter.com/oV4hUOODoz
13/n Like I said, all of this is pretty speculative. It's hard to say how much we managed to protect older people because often the seroprevalence data is not very good
14/n That being said, when we look at good quality seroprevalence estimates, in almost all cases after the initial surge it looks like we did in fact protect elderly people (at least to some extent)
15/n Yes, elderly people have died more from COVID-19, but that's an obvious consequence of the age-stratified IFR. If lots of people get infected, lots of old people will be infected by default
16/n I think it is reasonable to say that in most places we HAVE protected the elderly to a great degree, and we have still suffered the consequences when the pandemic got out of control
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