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Comment by diabeetusman | Hacker News Reader

That's over your entire lifetime, not a few weeks after getting infected. You don't have a 1% chance of dying in a car accident every time you drive.

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You're right, but unfortunately it's beside my point. (I took "chances of dying in a car crash" to mean it was the fatality rate of a car crash, which was wrong.) I was trying to find the chances of dying given you have a car crash, not the chances of being in a car crash and dying. (Which I guess leads to the spoiler: this was the distinction I was trying to make. That you can't just draw a conclusion from only looking at the former, which is what that 1% figure is. You need to look at the chances of getting the disease as well.) I updated the quoted source.

> I was trying to find the chances of dying given you have a car crash, not the chances of being in a car crash and dying.

That seems a weird statistic to seek out, because your conclusion would then be "...and we don't try to avoid getting in car crashes to avoid that 0.5% risk of death". Which is wrong, we do and we should try to avoid crashes.

No, not really. "We" (as in normal people, not e.g. automakers) don't "try to avoid getting in car crashes" to nearly such a degree as with COVID. We live our everyday lives and drive anyway, and doing pretty much whatever we want, except maybe a little slower (due to speed limits), staying within lanes, and while avoiding imminent dangers that pop up on the road. With COVID we're told to stay home and just scrap everything altogether. The response is entirely different, and is not warranted by just comparing those statistics. You need to include the other pieces as well.

Maybe a better example would be all the people who pay thousands to climb Everest. The mortality rate there is something like 1.3%.

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