And yet Canada's health care system gets better results and a lot less people going bankrupt due to medical bills... but anyway, sticking to the topic at hand. None of those percentages are very high indeed, at least not for young healthy people, but if you didn't take measures to slow the curve and make sure that infections get spread out in time, rather than just snowballing freely, they still would've gone high enough to get to such situations. And this is not something hypothetical we're talking about - the hospitals in Northern Italy, as well as those in NY/NJ, were flirting with that point earlier this year, despite their pretty radical lockdowns. And even despite the heroic efforts of the hospitals, the number of dead still went quite high - did you see those pictures of the town in Northern Italy where so many people were dying that the army had to come in and take the corpses to cemeteries in other towns, because the town's own cemeteries and funeral parlours were hopelessly swamped?

Sure, the large majority of the people who die are elderly, many of them would have died in the next five or ten years of something else if it wasn't of this - if that's how you want to look at it, that it doesn't much matter if old folks die somewhat quicker than they normally would, then I guess the cost of letting Covid run rampant isn't as high as for those of us who don't ascribe to that view. But that takes us back to those death panels again.

Also, for people who have serious symptoms but survive, there is a good chance of long-term lung damage - it's not like the flu where you recover and you're fine.