Really? The risks of COVID are pretty well known at this point, and for the vast majority of people they seem quite low.
And some will quibble over the precise definitions of "vast" and "low" in that statement.
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2815
Plus, there's common sense. I live in an area hit by COVID hard. About half of the people who I've heard of catching COVID19 through friend networks have some sort of long-term effects. Most are minor, but a few are not. I think the question is what happens a few years out.
I would expect that would leave a trail in literature if it were the case.
Do you have a source for that?
As far as I'm aware they're both pretty low, but we haven't had a study that concluded what you're saying.
The Nature article has risk of death for 0-19yo at about 0%, while your graph has flu deaths at 0.01% for that group.
Which means the flu is more dangerous for kids than covid-19.
The Nature article has risk of death for 20-40yo at ~0.02%, same as your graph, so it's probably on par in that age group. Which means that my original point stands, if you're not scared of dying of the flu, you should not be scared of dying of covid-19.
Unfortunately, humans have some crazy biases when it comes to evaluating risk. We're very bad at weighing the risk of rare events (<1% probability), we tend to overestimate them, and we're extremely bad at weighing new and previously not encountered risks, we severely overestimate them. The same bias also causes us to underestimate known risks, which is why some people are afraid of flying, but not of driving to the airport, even though risk analysis says it should be the other way around.
And this is why people think covid-19 is super-duper scary, while no-one cares about the flu, even though for most of us we should value them about the same.
See: https://i.insider.com/5ef234caf34d051bc821d0d8?width=1000&fo...
"Because that disagrees not only with the common sense of seeing what is happening in front of us, but also with all the other evidence I've seen"
This statement suggests you haven't looked at (m)any scientific articles. I've read dozens of scientific articles about long COVID. If you posted a reasonable rebuttal to some of these, it'd be one thing. But simply stating you've never seen any evidence? That's a statement about your own level of knowledge, not about COVID19.
Aside from that, I do look at "that idiot's Twitter feed" from time to time. Your comments mirror the things he posts downplaying COVID19. Perhaps you look at secondary sources based on his Twitter feed? Or the same sources he does? I'm not quite sure.
As an aside, I'd advise everyone to read "that idiot's Twitter feed," much as I advise everyone to read international news source, left-wing news sources, and right-wing ones. You don't need to agree with someone to read what they write.
The chronology of this subthread goes:
1) You claimed that COVID-19 is 10x more likely to kill an under-40-year-old than the flu. To me, having read many scientific papers (they are my primary source of information about the current pandemic), and also observing the world around me in several countries both in Asia and Europe (admittedly not the US), with a variety of approaches to the pandemic, including regular conversations with frontline medical staff due to my work, this appears to be a fantastical claim.
2) You provided an image of a graph as evidence, with only vague indication of the source data, making it virtually impossible to verify.
3) I asked for a more compelling source to back up what I perceive to be a fantastical claim.
4) You responded by pivoting to US politics (which I know very little about and don't consider particularly relevant to the topic at hand) and ignored my request for more evidence.
Edit: I have only just noticed that the poster of the graph and the you are not one and the same person. I apologise for making that assumption. While it was thus not a "pivot", I still think the US politics angle is ad hominem.
In no-good zombie-apocalypse Sweden, the total deaths/capita for 2020 is probably going to be above the 5-year average, but below the 10-year average and below the death rate of 2012.
Here's how the excess mortality of 2020 compares to the last 40 years of mortality in Germany, Sweden, France, and Belgium: https://medium.com/@FrankfurtZack/unprecedented-overall-mort...
If you didn't know about it, you wouldn't think anything special at all happened in 2020, just by looking at the statistics.
Right. And the flu deaths will be on top of the COVID deaths.
The number of dead due to covid-19 is not some kind of crazy anomaly that's going to stick out in the statistics.
Yes it is.
I don't know who @FrankfurtZack is beyond how he describes himself: "armchair virologist. hobbyvirologe, hobbystaatsepidemiologe". He has one post on Medium and that's it.
Here are some information sources that are more trustworthy.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/03/measuring-excess-mortali... (Boston Globe)
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
The CDC link in particular is good because the first graph you come across when you scroll down shows deaths going back to 2017, so you can compare COVID excess deaths with H1N1 excess deaths.
Also, reputable link to the European data you refer to?
* What portion of the population will have reduced lung capacity post-COVID? How long will it last?
* What about other long-term effects, such as chronic fatigue? What puts me at risk? What causes it? How long does it last?
* What about other organ damage?
Please give me some semblance of an idea of what portion of the population will have long-term disability due to COVID?
I'm sure as fuck not getting an untested vaccine, because I'm not in a risk group. If I catch the virus, my risk of death is in lightning strike territory.
For my 70+ dad, he's in a bunch of risk groups, which means the risk equation looks very different for him, and for him it might be worth the risk of an untested vaccine.
Everyone has to do the risk calculation for themselves, and everyone is going to come to different conclusions. That's how it's supposed to work, and that's how it works for pretty much every other non-childhood vaccine.
there's two wrong concepts here - you don't know how the virus will affect you medically. May be you will only suffer minor symptoms, or may be you will almost die with fluids in your lungs.
But that's not important. The most important aspect of you catching the virus is you become a transmission vector. And you cause infection in other people who _do_ suffer from the symptoms. And you cause economic damage because people will need to lock down, or reduce economic activity.
Therefore, it's not a matter of just risk to themselves that is important in the calculus of vaccines. It's the over-all health risk of the society.
We do know the probabilities of those things, and for healthy non-elderly people the latter outcome is very unlikely.
I'm curious why you decided to bring up the fact that we can't predict, with certainty, in advance which will happen. We can't do that for any disease, many of which are as bad or much worse than Covid-19.