So you’re saying America has far more old people than, say, Japan? OK.
There are other factors. Several other factors, it seems. And as we’ve already established, you seem completely unwilling to admit that old people naturally die at (much) higher rates that young people. I did a little chart for you. The blue line is risk of all-cause mortality in any given year. The red line is the CDC estimate for (risk of death|COVID-19 infection); the CDC figures, incidentally, despite being a suspiciously-straight log line, do check out against the raw data, once you’ve figured out what the baseline is.
It’s reasonable to consider the two as having some intuitive relationship since COVID-19 has been a year-long event.
zooming in on 0-60:
or with log axis:
Yes, one line is higher than the other. But you do need to consider natural/baseline death rate when hollering “won’t someone think of the old people?”. It isn’t meaningful to say age is a factor in COVID-19 deaths when age is the ultimate cause of all deaths. You will never see a banner headline proclaiming “LATEST STUDY: AGE IS MAIN CAUSE OF CANCER”.
Here is the same chart with a factor of (1/1.8) applied to all the risks, on the assumption that one-third of the older population has metabolic syndrome and the risk increase associated with m.s. is 3.4 in an older cohort:
So … a healthy 80-year old has maybe a 10% chance of dying in a COVID-19 year, compared to a hypothetical less-than-healthy average citizen at 5% in a normal year. Certainly a cause for concern, but it’s amazing how you can inflate that to “7000x the risk!” by buggering around with the numbers while not technically lying (the natural all-cause risk ratio between ages 5-17 and 85+, independent of disease, is about 1500x).
One might ponder on the political purpose of such scaremongering, might one not?