unexplained and more importantly totally unproven.
It certainly is more dangerous than the flu but if you're not weak or old taking some random untested drugs recommended on an internet forum by someone who has no idea what he's talking about is most likely more risky than just following health organisations recommendations.
> But on the individual level, it's about the same risk of death as you face over a normal year.
It's surely not. Even the "normal" averages include people who have big problems. If you are an individual who is not in the group of people with big problems, and if the virus can make you sick, your risk gets up significantly, as soon as you risk being infected. Because, for example, you can know that you personally aren't in the risk group of people tending to commit suicide.
The currently known estimate of "people who get the virus and have no recognizable symptoms during all phases of infection" is just around 20% across all the age groups. Knowing that younger than 45 aren't being only 20% of population, it doesn't sound so trivial.
The same (that one can know that catching virus increases risk) is for some of the people with big problems, even if they are young: it is known that some of those (who have some big problems) are hit much stronger by the virus, e.g. those with diabetes: without the virus they can safely expect to live for decades more, with the virus, they can immediately expect much less. And no, not only overweight people have diabetes.
And the above analysis is only for young people. But being old enough (and that is even for those being above 45) and catching the virus increases the risks of permanent health damage or death many times, according to all statistics we have.
Finally, no age group can expect to have "no problems" as soon as the health system collapses, and that is why the strict measures were introduced in most of the world -- it is a reasonable goal to avoid that much.
Getting covid at 30 is more dangerous than getting the flu at 30. If you want to argue otherwise please provide an actual peer reviewed study not a non scientists opinion piece or a pre print of a non peer reviewed study.
Even if it were merely as dangerous getting the flu at 30 doesn't result in you infecting as many people and not as many of those people subsequently die. Many people pass it on before they get any sort of symptoms and therefore are unable to just stay home and not pass it around.
Please stop passing around dangerous misinformation. Your advice could literally kill people.
> They are likely not considering that even the younger are taking as much as a 1% risk of their life, which is incredibly high. Depending on factors like the load on the medical community at the time and others, it can get as high as 5% or more quite easily as we have seen around the world. Currently using only napkin math from the numbers here[1], the death rate is currently at just under 4% over all age groups in the US.
Those are pretty high numbers. Using a Lancet study (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...), IFR is just under 0.1% for a 30 something year old. Hospitalization rates are at 3.5% (2-7% confidence), so a death rate (for 30 year olds) even under a collapsing medical systems for younger people is highly unlikely to get close to 5%.
All said, a 0.1% death rate is still pretty dangerous and catching the disease is something like raising your risk of death by 50% in a given year. Lockdowns are still justified under those numbers.
> Finally, flu deaths almost exclusively happen in the immunocompromised and elderly, while COVID-19 affects younger people a LOT more.
Well, and old people even more. Are the relative risk ratios actually different for covid vs. flu - or are we just seeing the effect of a disease that is 7xish a really bad flu season?
(For young children actually, I believe covid outcomes are better than flu.)
>there's a whole host of things between "life" and "death" that are not stated or that we simply do not know.
Being a lifelong runner, I agree with you 100%. I'm not panicked or unreasonable about it or anything, but I do protect my body. (So glad they canceled Boston by the way.)
I would encourage people under 60 to consider the very real possibility that certain physical activities that you enjoy may become difficult for you. Some may even become life threatening. Who knows? Hiking or running at certain altitudes, etc. Consider the sense of loss you might feel at not being able to do workouts that seemed a breeze just last year? Or how would you feel if you suddenly found that you need frequent rests to "salsa the night away"?
This virus is likely harmless if you're 15 or under. It's fairly deadly if you're over 60. But if you're 15 to 55, there's a whole lot we don't know right now.
I meant when comparing it to how deadly the virus is. The virus might be 1000x more deadly for the average person, but that's grouping 20 year-olds with 85 year-olds.
> - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission
Interesting comparison. So here we're talking about the risk of dying from Covid-19. What about the risk of becoming seriously ill? What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist?
This seems to be a big part of your reasoning but I don't think this is true. Yes, risk does skew there. But there are large numbers of non-elderly people who have been severely affected.
If you can show me any data that shows that Covid was even remotely and possibly dangerous to healthy people under 40, I’ll listen.
And by remotely and possibly dangerous, I mean more of a risk of death than any other possible event or disease that can happen to healthy people in that age group.
But you can’t, because that data does not exist. Covid was simply not dangerous for healthy people under 40.
This virus has only killed 20,000 people under the age of 55 in America. That's way less than car accidents and the flu, etc. This is not a pandemic if you're under the age of 55 this isn't even the flu.
So any epidemiologist under the age of 55 who is fearful... I wouldn't trust their math skills.
> People using the "they were going to die anyway" argument need to explain why they didn't die last year, or next year, but died this year, and died in huge numbers. Excess mortality is pretty high.
That's not the argument I am making. A lot of older people indeed died sooner than they otherwise would have. COVID is statistically more dangerous to them than Influenza, but also COVID spreads more rapidly than Influenza in a population with zero immunity.
> Research tells us people are dying more than 10 years early.
This is significantly lower than the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which averaged above 20 YLL per case:
I have never heard of any healthy person under 40 dying from purely the flu. COVID-19 is certainly less dangerous to the young than the old, but there are plenty examples of it killing young and otherwise healthy people.
Nope. Look at the data again. The risk of dying from an infection in the 18-49 age group is 0.06%. The risk of hospitalization from an infection in that age group is 3%; you claimed 0.08% which is wrong by two orders of magnitude.
It’s more likely to kill old and obese people, but there are still plenty of rarer cases of harm to younger fitter people (eg triathletes on oxygen post-infection). It’s not binary.
If we pick the 25-29 year olds and an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.01% [1] it's still 13.5M x 0.01% = 1,350 deaths. It's not a lot by any means, but it's not 'almost nothing' either.
This is the worst case scenario of cause, sibling comment has already mentioned long Covid, where we don't know prevalence precisely.
I'm aware I've picked the 'worse half' of the 20 year olds, 20-24 will fare better obviously.
Under 60 years old, certainly not.
> some unexplained reinfection mechanism
unexplained and more importantly totally unproven.
It certainly is more dangerous than the flu but if you're not weak or old taking some random untested drugs recommended on an internet forum by someone who has no idea what he's talking about is most likely more risky than just following health organisations recommendations.
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