> His "agenda" is likely a strong philosophical belief that it's more important to base policy on a solid scientific foundation than to reach an apparently preferred conclusion, because this is more likely to reliably reach a long term positive result. At least, that's what it feels like internally for me.
I don't disagree...but I think it's much more concrete than this. At the scale of 330M people (let alone 7 billion), tiny risks matter. The OP simply cannot see past the emotion of the debate to the idea that even a few hundred-thousandths of a percent of additional mortality risk means that 100 people will die in the US.
If those 100 people were otherwise healthy and at no risk from Covid, that's a disaster. If the OP wants to take the tiny risk, that's fine, but it's a different matter to encourage other people to do it without evidence.
> you need to state them in absolute risk if you want people to be able to understand and make decisions.
I refute this on the grounds that an alarming number of people seem not to care about their own health given a 1/1000 risk of death (or worse for older or at-risk populations) from SARS-CoV-2. If half the country doesn't care about those odds, what makes us think any measurable amount of people will care about... don't know, 1/50k odds?
But I see where you're coming from. In a perfect world, you'd be right.
> The pro-science stance is very numbers-focused, but ignores hard-to-quantify things that really do matter.
To me it feels like the numbers are focused on one metric: deaths from covid (per capita).
It seems obvious that that is what we should be focusing on. But I think most humans accept some risk of death in everyday choices. For example, driving to meet your friends to have dinner or "watch the game" or whatever brings some risk of death that "staying home alone" wouldn't.
For two years now, people have been in various states of behavioral modification to avoid "deaths from covid". During that time, children have suffered reduced learning; businesses have died or been killed; single people have gotten increasingly depressed; the country has increased anxiety. None of those things show up in "deaths from covid".
I don't know what the right answer is. But I do think that I personally am ready to "get back to normal" as much as possible.
>Right now, covid is the leading cause of death. It wasn't the case in 2020, but now, it is.
Are you implying you think covid will kill more americans than heart disease in 2021 based on this incomplete data set?
>>How many people even knows what chance it is they will die this year?
>That question is meaningless.
It is not meaningless for people who care to take personal responsibility for their own health, and who want to make informed decisions based on a data driven risk analysis.
However, most Americans do not care to take personal responsibility for their health, so you're right that such people are not concerned with such information.
> If you consider a risk of death of 1 in 350,000 as "ridiculously unlikely", then you would have to accept that death from COVID is also "ridiculously unlikely" for that part of the population. It then is only logical that you would take the lesser of two "ridiculously low" risks, and that's exactly how it works in medicine.
Right, but wrong. You dismiss the low factor because it is outweighed by other factors. For example you give someone a medicine that may kill them in rare circumstances to return them to a physically active life Just as you tell people to ride bikes despite deaths and brain injuries.
This framing has to simply stop. In past decades it was not acceptable to mix up public health with this personalized health nonsense and it is most likely going to result in an ebola-like outbreak with a slightly dangerous vaccine getting out of hand while people fear monger on the internet over odds that we accept whenever we step on to a public street.
> My point is more like, 10x the number of people could be dying of COVID per day than are dying right now, and I would care about 10x more than I care about all those people who are dying of heart disease, which would still be an indescribably small amount of care, even with the multiplier. I am not making the argument that it's "just a flu", but I will make the argument that it's "just death". Death is. Only a sheltered person is emotionally distraught because of this; and in turn, only a person who cannot handle this perspective would deem it logical to permanently damage society in order to reduce this number.
What are you talking about? 3500 died in a single day, that's a 9/11. Multiply it by tenfold like you said, and do it for a year, you're looking at 12.7 million Americans dying alone. Is that a death rate you don't care about? For comparison, the 1st world war, second world war, vietnam war, korean war, war in afghanistan, war in iraq, combined, gets you to about 0.45m casualties.
And that's in one year and one country. On a global scale it'd be insane, and again, just one year. A year in which a vaccine is rolled-out and can end the lockdown. Ending that lockdown now without having rolled-out the vaccine makes no sense.
>>> So if in one population you get 458 deaths from Covid compared to 57,263 from all other causes and in the other population you get 38,964 from covid compared to 65,170 from all other causes, we can immediately tell that one population fared much better at least when it comes to your chance to die of covid compared to chance of dying to all other causes.
I think your math is off. What if the first population only has 458 people in it? 100% mortality for that population would obviously suggest you want to be part of the other population even if their total deaths were higher. The issue I'm calling out is that we don't know the size of each population. I certainly don't think vaccines increase mortality, I actually believe it has a large positive impact. The point is this data doesn't help us understand how impactful it really is and, given all the debate over this, if they'd framed the data with better context, this could actually be a very useful study in ending that debate.
> The implication of your post is that 1% of people dying isn’t an issue so long as they are old or fat.
Nowhere did I state or suggest that it's not a big deal if old and "fat" (your words, not mine, interestingly) people die.
The fact that the death rate is magnitudes of order higher in countries where over 40% of the population is overweight is not a tidbit of no importance. It's hugely important because it reflects the disparity of risk that exists in groups with certain comorbidities.
Other figures are just as stark. For instance, according to the CDC, 513 children 0-17 have died from COVID during the entire pandemic. Obviously, all of those 513 lost lives had value but if you ignore the fact that 745 times more people 75 and over have died from COVID than those aged 0-17, you will miss the forest for the trees.
In short, how can we have an honest discussion about COVID risk without acknowledging that the risk is very clearly not equal in all individuals?
> Now imagine a sports venue where every 5 games 10 people died of food poisoning but far more got really sick and some even required hospitalisation. Would you choose to eat the food at that venue when you went there?
How are these figures at all comparable to COVID? If we're going to have an intelligent conversation about COVID risk, pulling numbers out of thin air and using irrelevant comparisons isn't constructive.
> I just calculated by risk of dying from COVID-19 on https://www.qcovid.org/ and it is 1 in 15873.
It's not the risk of you dying that is important. It's the risk of you passing it on to other people.
If your son passes it on to his grandparents, teachers, service workers, or even his girlfriends immunodeficient sibling, would you still think it's absolute madness?
> Even if all of those side effects were fatal (and they wouldn't be), that would still be only 3,300 deaths--less than 1 percent of the US COVID death count currently reported.
No, because even if you assume no black swan (ex: zombie outbreak due to bad QC control of a new and untested mRNA technology) you are trading less old people death for more young people death.
Why should I increase my low risk of death even by 5% to save an old person that has maybe 1 year left to live anyway?
> You're wrong, but primarily because you insist on treating human life so trivially.
No, it's because I'm not overweighting risks that are trivial for the vast, vast majority of people. Of course if you're over 80 and have 3 pre-existing comorbid conditions (as is in Italy) you should be careful. If you're under 10, nobody's died. In fact nCoV-19 doesn't really even spread between children. If you're under 40 the mortality rate is 0.2%, and that's a worse-case number including folks with co-morbid conditions.
Risk exists, and we should be comfortable with it. I recommend reading Schneier's essay on our decreasing tolerance for risk [1] and how it can often lead to us doing ourselves more harm than good.
You have a 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident. You've got a 2% lifetime risk of dying of an opioid overdose.
> But you're focus on people hacking and wheezing their way to death. You're ignoring upwards of 5-15% of those people who will have to be on a ventilator OR WORSE. This is NOTHING like the flu.
Yes, it is like the flu. H1N1 Influenza A has a ~10% mortality rate in the elderly, similar to nCoV-19.
> You would do yourself a favor also to examine what it is that Italy, Wuhan and South Korea are going through to try and stop it. They certainly aren't "GOING BACK TO WORK."
Really the economic and individual harm and impact there has a lot to do with what they're doing to try and stop the spread. The cure is worse than the disease here.
They probably should go back to work, though, and in China, they already are. They should wash their hands and stay home if they're sick, and get back to work.
> Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID
Yes but a very small part of those are relevant to my personal assessment of risk of bad COVID. The risk depends strongly on age, health status, lifestyle and so on. Absolute numbers of deaths are not that important to personal risk assessment.
> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices...
No, it's not; it's arrogant.
All of the epidemiologists and experts seem to think otherwise. What do you know that they don't?
So far 172,000 people have died in the US due to Coronavirus, directly[1]. The actual number of people who have died, if you factor in the effect of the virus on infrastructure and missed diagnoses is about double that[2].
We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3].
Your claim that it's comparable to lightning, which kills about 50 people per year in the USA, is completely inaccurate and displays a grandiose arrogance. An arrogance that, nationwide, has resulted in a staggering number of tragedies this year.
> your risk of dying from a COVID infection is 0.37%
I'm 55 so I'm pretty sure my risk is higher than that. Also, the covid risk is highly front-loaded. If I'm gong to die from covid, I'm likely to do so now whereas if I'm going to die in a car crash that might happen now or it might happen later. I don't really care about dying per se. Sooner or later it's going to happen. What I care about is dying sooner and more painfully than I have to. Drowning on my own bodily fluids doesn't sound like a pleasant way to go.
> at our current covid death rate, that 45K people happens about every 10 to 15 days. call it two weeks for simplicity's sake.
Your math is wrong, 45 /1.5 = 30
But so what? 8,000 people tragically die a day in the US under accepted normal conditions and we move on.
> none of this has ANYTHING TO DO with the argument I made, which is that the grandparent's estimate of a worst-case scenario was just wildly inaccurate
Realistically if you are young, healthy, and vaccinated that is the worst case scenario.
>What is selfish is to ignore other factors that play an even more significant role than coronavirus, which has an extremely low mortality rate
You are just flat wrong, dangerously so. The actual numbers show that Covid-19 is 10s to 100s of times more deadly than the flu. You are just wildly uninformed and your confidence in your ignorance is astonishing.
> at our current covid death rate, that 45K people happens about every 10 to 15 days. call it two weeks for simplicity's sake.
I think your numbers may be a tad off in general, but regardless, I'm pretty sure you're including unvaccinated adults. While I absolutely don't want anyone to die, I don't feel a responsibility to protect people who aren't willing to take the most basic of steps to protect themselves.
I think you undercut your own point for no reason.
Less deadly diseases get less reverence, leading to more risk taking. The percentage of people who die goes down, but the number of cases goes way up, resulting in potentially greater loss of life overall. Look at how cavalier we are about influenza, and then we set policy based on whether things are worse than the flu.
Read the part you quoted carefully: the death rate in the control group is 3 per 100,000. And if you read the rest of the paper, you'll see that the study population was entirely over age 50.
Remember that the risk of death from Covid-19 goes up exponentially with age -- something like 90% of all fatalities are over age 50 [1]. If you're in the typical HN demographic (<30 yo), your risk of mortality from Covid-19 is much lower than what is reported for baseline here.
I want to put this in perspective. Per The Book of Risks (chapter 8; annual risks) [2], your overall chance of dying in a typical year is 1 in 115 (~870 per 100,000) Your chance of being murdered is 1 in 11,000 (9 per 100,000). The chance you'll die of an accident is 1 in 2,900 (34 per 100,000). From a fall: 1 in 20,000 (5 per 100,000). By getting hit by a car while walking: 1 in 40,000 (2.5 per 100,000).
In other words, your all-ages chance of dying from Covid-19 after two doses is somewhere between your annual chance of dying from a fall, and dying after being hit by a car -- and it's much lower than that if you're under age 50! Divide that number by ten, and you're in the realm of risks that any sane person wouldn't even consider: the annual chance of dying by freezing, for example (1 in 3,000,000).
Point being: dividing a very small number by 10 is indeed a 90% risk reduction, but you have to weigh it against the costs very carefully. There are tons of reasons why I wouldn't take a 90% relative risk reduction, if the baseline risk were quite small (as it is here).
I don't disagree...but I think it's much more concrete than this. At the scale of 330M people (let alone 7 billion), tiny risks matter. The OP simply cannot see past the emotion of the debate to the idea that even a few hundred-thousandths of a percent of additional mortality risk means that 100 people will die in the US.
If those 100 people were otherwise healthy and at no risk from Covid, that's a disaster. If the OP wants to take the tiny risk, that's fine, but it's a different matter to encourage other people to do it without evidence.
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