Read on Twitter
This is interesting - bc my immediate thought when I see this is to think that we're underreporting on nursing home deaths, seniors & people in congregate care, because those people are "expected" to die (from COVID, in general) and thus seen as less important to highlight. https://twitter.com/ZacBissonnette/status/1296551959617572866
Not saying we can't do better contextualizing risk & explaining things, but part of the reason young people's deaths get covered is because they're seen as more exceptional, and especially tragic.
(This is also the perennial problem with crime reporting - rare and exceptional crimes are more "newsworthy" - but also give people a very distorted idea of what's actually happening, what crime rates are and who's at risk.)
It's also really hard to calibrate reporting on kids right now (the ed reporter says) bc we know kids are less at risk. And we also know the institutions where kids & teens gather in groups (schools, colleges) have been basically closed in-person since March.
So less at risk, for sure. But how much less, and law of large numbers and all the rest still make getting the mix right really hard, IMO, just as a local reporter trying to inform parents who are terrified and facing a ton of bad options right now.
And without wading into the whole ethics around death and expected life years left thing bc it tends to bring out some ugly arguments - I have never interviewed or spoken to a 90yo who didn't have a fascinating, rich and newsworthy in some way life.
