Overall mortality at age 55 is about 0.5%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age...
In general, COVID-19's IFR by age is pretty close to overall mortality. So even in unrestricted spread, limited by only herd immunity, at worst direct deaths from it would less than double your chances of dying in a year.
The way this is phrased makes it sound like it's not a big deal. Doubling every individual's chance of dying within an entire generation is not something we should say lightly. Imagine if the base fatality rate was 50% rather than .5%.
It's certainly not an existential threat to society.
I guess I never realized how risk averse people apparently are. I imagine these same people never drive a car since those things are deathtraps by comparisons.
Assessing the Age Specificity of Infection Fatality Rates for COVID-19: Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, and Public Policy Implications https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...
Anyway, my point was simply that if we took the same attitude towards risk that you all do with COVID and applied that elsewhere, we’d all be rolling around in hermetically sealed hamster balls until we died of boredom.
The following numbers are from several month old seroprevalence studies so take them with a grain of salt but:
https://www.ryankemper.io/post/2020-04-29-the_case_for_endin...
Pegs the 50-59 age range around the median IFR. Whereas the >70 mortality is where things really start falling off of a cliff.
BTW my point was never “your chance of dying in a car crash is >= COVID”...although that statement would be very true for <40 age populations. My point was more broadly that people have a risk aversion to COVID that is unmatched by their attitudes towards risk in all other areas of life.
Which was based on your observation of driving VS Covid19 mortality, or at least it appeared to be from the comment.
People have a very natural risk aversion for a new disease that is extremely likely to kill their parents or grandparents, that has unknown long-term effects, that has no known treatment, and that risks becoming endemic if not contained soon (and that has already killed more people than malaria).
"The Dutch government reported multiple cases of transmission from mink to farm staff"
If it can happen in a farm, there's a reasonable chance it can happen in the wild too. Cats also seem to be able to get it: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200911/covid-19-may-strike...
Animal reservoirs make the flu pretty much impossible to eradicate.
With a conservative herd immunity threshold of 50%, that'd put an uncontrolled COVID-19 pandemic and random car accidents about equal for that age group. For the 50-69 age group, the CDC estimates a 0.5% IFR, so COVID-19 would be 25x higher mortality than random car crashes.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... 2) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
By "that research" you mean https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v... right?
Because it actually gives a slightly lower IFR than the CDC at age 55 (0.4% vs 0.5%), not higher. So I'm not sure what you mean.
> US roads are far more dangerous than UK roads.
Yes, according to the WHO(1) the US has a 3.6x higher mortality rate from car accidents than the UK, which gets us to 90x higher for the age group I quoted.
Anyway, I didn't want to contradict that figure. Just give perspective.
1)https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_s...
More than just risk adverse, I think a lot of people don't understand how risky life in general is.
edit: ...and I'll point out, those truck drivers may still have been brave! If you mistakenly think the risk is higher than it actually is, you're still brave for taking it on.
1) https://www.trucks.com/2017/12/26/trucking-deadliest-jobs/