Some people will misinterpret the conclusion. It varies significantly by age brackets not considered in the paper.
A 40 year old would be mistaken to assume their fatality chance is 0.31%.
A 40 year old would be mistaken to assume their fatality chance is 0.31%.
So COVID is in fact very dangerous for 40-year-olds. Pose a thought experiment: if someone said "would you go out drinking with your friends tonight if there was a 10% chance that, for the next 12 months, you'll be 5x as likely to die in a car crash than baseline?" I would say "absolutely not, why would you even ask me this?" and I certainly wouldn't take that risk over-and-over again for such a petty reason.
You would play the lottery with those odds, wouldn't you? But you don't want to play that lottery.
People don't realize how high odds of 1 in a 1000 are until you flip it around like that.
1 year is ~1.25% of my life that I will not get back no matter what.
Now, anyone is free to stay in their pod and eat bugs, if they're scared.
How would this society fight any large scale war? Or make any large scale sacrifice like people fixing up consequences of Chernobyl disaster did?
People used to rather die for honor, than live in shame. Had duels, took risky lifestyles, discovering new things and so on. Fought and died for their ideas.
And now what? Wrap yourself in a blanket and lie scared on the bed?
What's the point of living, if we're too afraid to die to actually live?
I am pessimistic on changes of survival of western civilization.
Sacrifice is exactly what people aren't doing and why we're living through this disaster.
The sacrifice we should be looking at is not the risk of catching COVID-19. It's that of following a set of rules that drastically minimize the spread of the disease. Simple rules, by the way.
If everyone had the kind of thinking some (most?) Asian societies have (collective first, individual second), we'd be looking at a much different world right now. I'm thinking mainly of Taiwan.
But no, we have to deal with people throwing tantrums because they can't wear a piece of cloth over their faces.
I actually pick up food from local restaurants around me.
I (and many other people) continued to pay my gym membership when they had to close due to the lockdown, to support them during that time.
And so on.
I don't even have the option not to wfh (and even if I had, why would I go to the office and risk unnecessary exposure to the virus?), since my office closed for our safety even before government lockdowns became a thing.
Under 48 there basically similar chance of dying as the flu.
National health policy should not be based on personal outcomes.
Numbers? Or maybe "basically similar" means "an order of magnitude larger".