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jjk166

Hoping it's mild is great. Betting your life it's mild is dumb.

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243 deaths per 100,000 in the U.S. (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality).

The death distributions are very clear.

If you're healthy, betting that you would be OK is a very reasonable bet.

Death is merely the most extreme outcome. Not dying doesn't mean you're OK.

Long COVID is a big deal, and it apparently affects half of those who get COVID [1]. Furthermore, even double-vaxxed, while protected against hospitalization or death, are still at risk (reduced about 50%) for long COVID [2].

Until/unless Omicron has been proven to have less severe long covid symptoms, yeah I'm treating it with the same caution that I'd do with Delta.

[1] https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/how-many-people-get-... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2

> Long COVID is a big deal

Long Covid is not a defined term. It comprises everything from "post-hospitalization syndrome" -- which is something that has existed since long before Covid -- to "slight cough for a few weeks". If you're young (under 65) and otherwise healthy, you are highly unlikely to have anything more than a minor illness. Particularly after vaccination.

Here's a paper that might interest you:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

> In this cross-sectional analysis of 26,823 adults from the population-based French CONSTANCES cohort during the COVID-19 pandemic, self-reported COVID-19 infection was associated with most persistent physical symptoms, whereas laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection was associated only with [loss of smell].

In other words, in a large study out of France, the only "long covid symptom" actually correlated with SARS-CoV2 infection was loss of smell. All of the other various symptoms were associated with self-reported illness, but not confirmed illness.

This is a fairly strong argument that "long covid" is at least partly psychosomatic. We'd probably see this more clearly if the various "long covid" studies didn't rely exclusively on self-reporting of symptoms, and mix together all levels of illness.

Ironically if this is true, then the people loudly handwringing about "long covid" are the ones who are inflicting it on others, by encouraging people to fear it.

To combat this, perhaps we could swap the masks out with gags. /s

That article is so bad it might as well be misinformation. 79% of the people in the study were hospitalized, and the authors did not correct for this.

That works out to 1-in-400. 6 times more deadly than base jumping. Not factoring the risk of long-term disability from post-viral CFS.

I'll happily give those odds a miss.

Those (likely) aren't your odds.

Without knowing your specific background, your numbers are probably much less.

E.g. ages 0-17, there's been 644 deaths. Across a cohort with ~75,000,000 people.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...

Assuming that OP is a teenager or toddler...I guess that could be called "passive-aggressive optimism."

And I've had a HN account for over 8 years... precocious little scamp aren't I!

Some NFL stadiums host 100k people. Would you go to a game if you knew 243 people were going to be randomly executed at it?

I suspect many people would go especially if they knew 243 people were going, the types of people who believe it wouldn't happen to them, only to others (probably someone who made the "bad choices" in life because god/fate/karma/etc)

Would you attend the game if it were 11 people?

Because that's what you do every time you drive. 11 crash fatalities per 100,000 people.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

Driving has benefits.

Getting infected with COVID does not.

Except COVID is not the end goal here, it is living a full life in proximity to other human beings that comes with a risk of getting COVID. It is no different in purpose than driving for the most part.

There's a wide spectrum of precautions available. I traveled overseas recently, but I KN95 masked on the plane and tested before departure and on arrival. I felt like I was living a pretty full life in Bora Bora, while also taking steps to ensure the safety of myself and others around me.

Same thing with driving; we have a variety of safety precautions - quite a few of them mandatory - involved that help tilt the cost/benefit balance in our favor.

Why travel anywhere if you are living a flu life in Bora Bora?

Unfortunately, that was my travel destination, so I only got a week there. I heartily recommend a visit.

It’s a pity you and your fellow travelers are destroying the world with your carbon emissions. Good thing you wear a mask tho.

Good news: you can address that, if you're so inclined. https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/company/global-citizens...

With our Eco-Skies® CarbonChoice carbon offset sponsorship program, we’ll purchase carbon offsets on behalf of our customers so all their corporate air travel with us is 100% carbon neutral.

So they will buy carbon indulgences for your corporate trip to Bora Bora but not regular travelers?

It's presented as an option on checkout for any United flight, or you can do it directly after the fact at https://united.conservation.org/. $34 for my round trip.

Getting back to life with COVID with the appropriate amount of precautions and restrictions has benefits. Current hysteria and alarmism shows we are not there yet.

These statements don't follow from anything anyone has said.

You would need to compare the benefits of driving to the benefits of living a normal life, and compare that to the risks of dying from each.

Why would getting infected with COVID have benefits? What are you trying to say?

'Why would getting infected with COVID have benefits?'

Why do you think you get a choice? Without extreme measures of staying locked up, most everyone will encounter the virus. Why not help your body deal with it by going for a walk today to get some exercise? Life is to live, not eat ourselves to overweight deaths.

Yes. Pollution. Destruction of land. Serious injury. Noise. Urban sprawl.

So many benefits.

> Getting infected with COVID does not.

Going to a live game has benefits. Do those not matter?

That risk is an order of magnitude lower. Moreover, you're not taking that risk "...every time you drive". That risk is much lower, of course, given that most people drive more than once a year.

Correct. It is about 1 death per 100 million miles driven per the table given by the other commenter. Those are actually much better odds than I was expecting!

that doesn’t mean it takes you driving 100m miles to die; that’s a population level statistic. your lifetime chances of death by car is 1 in 100.

Right. The 100m miles is more useful because it sets the scale of usage. 1 in 100 odds over your lifetime doesn't say anything about how likely you are to die at any given point in time. It's just that when you do die, there was a 1% chance it was in a car accident.

> Moreover, you're not taking that risk "...every time you drive". That risk is much lower, of course, given that most people drive more than once a year.

The OP comparison of Covid to a football game has the same issue, of course.

>Because that's what you do every time you drive. 11 crash fatalities per 100,000 people

This is a ludicrous abuse of statistics. 11 fatalities per 100k people is 11 fatalities per 100k people's worth of trips. That is a few orders of magnitude less than executing 11 people out of every 100k who show up to a stadium.

No NFL stadiums host 100k people. All stadiums in the US with a capacity over 100k are college football stadiums: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._stadiums_by_capac...

> Would you go to a game if you knew 243 people were going to be randomly executed at it?

Covid-19 deaths are not randomly distributed. We've known this for nearly two years now.

For context, the cancer death rate is 153 per 100,000 in the US, so about 60% of the risk from Covid. Am I living in constant fear of cancer? No. Am I taking reasonable precautions to avoid getting cancer? Yes.

Depends on what you consider reasonable. Per this study [0] NYC had, as of June 2020, about 100 deaths under age 65 from people without comorbidities. During the same time period there were about 200,000 cases. This made the chance of a healthy person dying from COVID about 1 in 2000.

Given the option, I'm not taking that bet. I wouldn't play Russian roulette even with a 2000-bullet revolver. Especially when there are pretty simple steps I can take to further minimize the risk.

(It would be nice to have more-- and updated-- data than this. If anyone is aware of a source, I'd love to know about it)

That's also discounting other (and possibly not yet known) complications from getting COVID. There might not be much of any, but we it will be some time before we know that so I wouldn't discount that factor in my risk analysis.

Serious measure to mitigate transmission rates still seems like a very reasonable practice, even for healthy people.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7327471/

>Depends on what you consider reasonable

Thank-you for acknowledging the subjectivity of Risk Tolerance.

Yep, we all draw our own lines on that. The complicating factor with COVID is that acting on your own higher risk tolerance impacts other people too. That's why we've seen such disagreement in society over the types & level of precautions to take. (Apart from when it is just outright politicized for political gain)

> Betting your life it's mild is dumb.

But keeping the panic dialed up to 11 for two years is very healthy.

Signed, someone who probably now has a cardiac neurosis.

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