One, we've greatly reduced the risk of COVID through vaccines. This is the primary thrust of the article; if you've vaccinated, you're very unlikely to have serious consequences.
Two, we're fatigued. You just can't be constantly vigilant for two or three years without something breaking. This compounds point one. We don't, as the article mentions, know what kind of relationship Omicron has to long COVID, but at this point, many are too tired to care. "I'm safe enough" is all we have the capacity for.
Third, a large portion of the population is in denial about their own levels of risk. If there was a 1% chance of dying every time you drove a car, or even a 1% chance of dying every time you got into a car accident, there would be panic in the streets, no pun intended. But a lot of people round a 1% chance of dying from COVID down to zero.
The numbers are very clear on this:
There are people who have a 1% or greater risk of dying if they catch it.
Most people do not fall into that category, not even close.
Let's start with the fact that the 1% IFR is calculated using a faulty denominator. Due to the high prevalence of asymptomatic infection, the denominator is far smaller than it should be.
I was the only one in my household to have a single symptom when I caught it in February. My wife and two children did not have any symptoms and would not have been tested if I had not gotten myself tested. Wow this is an anecdote, it is directionally aligned with seroprevalence surveys.
Omicron is even less symptomatic and therefore, we still have a denominator that is far too small.
To put it into perspective, school children at the elementary age are actually at higher risk of death from an influenza infection than they are from a covid one. Obviously this does not apply to children who are immunocompromised or have comorbidities. They are the only age group that has a higher death rate from the influenza than from covid. But it is still notable. We have been sending our kids to schools without masks for decades even in the midst of various influenza epidemics.
Over time populations in the US that are less sensitive to media reporting, especially working class people, have formed their own intuitive risk calculations based on their anecdotal experience. Your average taxi driver has a pretty good understanding of who is at high risk and who isn't. I experienced this in Vegas when a woman driving my taxi stated to me that the people she knew who had died were all old or "really really fat". Her words not mine lol.
The people who are under 50 years of age who round 1% down to zero are more accurate than you are in their assessment. I hope I don't sound rude when I state that but based on the numbers it is accurate.
I don't intend to be rude, but what you are stating is a huge deal, and should have been earth-shattering news in the media. A doubling of fatality for a pandemic is not something that fails to make it into talking points when governments across the world are struggling to convince people to get vaccinated.
Additionally, I live in the US state of Colorado. A few days ago, a post on HN's front page showed that Colorado's cases are now 100% omicron. That's not being addressed in your statement. Eventually, omicron will crowd out delta in other places as well.
I don't think you and I differ much in our broad conclusions on covid, but I don't think it makes sense to compare "chance of dying every time you drove a car" with "chance of dying if you catch covid"--basically this is a type error, you're comparing apples and oranges. The proper comparison operand for "every time you drove a car" would be "every time you interact with one or more people in person". Of course, you don't have a 1% chance of dying by covid every time you interact with one or more people in person because each interaction has a relatively low chance of contagion. Moreover, if there's a 1% chance that the average person would die from covid, that doesn't imply that a healthy person (i.e., no co-morbidities) has a 1% chance of dying from covid, so it's perfectly possible that the cohort who are risking covid exposure also have a lower risk of dying from covid than the average person (of course, I'm just responding to your framing of self-preservation--there's a good moral argument that healthy people should also be concerned about their contribution to spreading the virus irrespective of their own risk).
An obvious example of this is that the CDC numbers on COVID deaths by age. It's blatantly obvious, yet people on here wave their hand and say "1%" as if most HN readers are remotely close to 1% death rate, when it's a community composed of software engineers, a profession that skews young as a whole.
Here's the stats. Bear in mind that the distribution of CASES skews young.
https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true
Roughly 20,000 people between 18 and 40 died of covid.
About 35,000 between 40 and 50.
426k of the deaths were age 75 and up. 188k were people between 65 - 74.
Case Fatality Rate = confirmed deaths / confirmed cases
Infection Fatality Rate = total deaths / total infections
Total infections can only be estimated, and is much higher than confirmed cases because most people who get COVID-19 don't get tested for it (either because they're asymptomatic, unable to get tested, or don't see see a point since they already know they're sick). Thus the infection fatality rate is substantially less than the case fatality rate.
This paper estimates the median infection fatality rate to be 0.23% https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/
Also worth noting that deaths could be overestimated since anyone who dies having tested COVID positive is counted as a COVID death, and pretty much all patients who enter a hospital these days are tested for COVID.
Vaccines weren't widely available back then
If you could drive drunk without risking other people, it'd be more societally acceptable. Similarly, now that vaccination is widely available for at-risk groups, it's a bit more acceptable to take actions that spread the virus that puts those folks at risk.
It was widely available a year ago. The most at risk groups were the first and most comprehensively vaccinated. What gives? If the conditions for re-opening were met a year ago why were we wearing masks outdoors and whatnot this whole time? Comments like these seem like little more than mental gymnastics to justify having held an opinion that didn't age well w.r.t. the various degrees of covid measures we've endured.
Edit: Fine then, call it 6mo. Regardless, I'd be very interested to see someone provide in a "better than just saving face" quality defense of why businesses have been at reduced capacity, government services have been limited in their accessibility, etc, etc. beyond the point at which the vulnerable were vaccinated and why we're continuing to have this debate. I know information was less great then but we have it now. How do people oppose re-opening wholesale-ish. I foresee nursing homes keeping some precautions but the DMV, using covid as an excuse for why I can't register a car at a certain service location, being masked at outdoor venues, come on.
A year ago today 0.4% of the American population was fully vaccinated. 3.1% had had a first dose. https://imgur.com/a/aUpVwtb
You're acting like there's someone who can just declare a national preoccupation to be over. As always, your problem isn't the government. It's that the majority of your fellow citizens do not agree with you.
This is further evidenced in the article, in which literally the _very first line_ is a mild dunk on the GOP. Why do Americans do this? Why must literally any policy decision be chiefly looked at through the lens of Red vs. Blue?
This is coming from a Canadian whose frequently frustrated that one can't voice any concerns about COVID policy without being lumped in with a crowd which I otherwise share almost nothing in common with.
In the first year of the pandemic, the people you're talking about were okay with the personal risk, which is fine, but also ignoring, downplaying, or refusing to care about the risk to others who couldn't protect themselves. Which is less okay in my opinion.
But now, the vast majority of people still at risk have chosen not to protect themselves. So vaccinated individuals choosing to live life normally are increasing the chances the virus spreads, but not increasing the risk of serious injury or death to the defenseless and vulnerable.
I don’t know where you are getting the 10 times worse from.
There are only 17k people per year who receive any kind of spinal cord injury, from all sources, not just cars.
That means you could even count all spinal injuries as a death!! If every person with a spinal injury somehow just died, it would still be a smaller problem than COVID deaths.
COVID would still be 7 or 8 times worse than these theoretically extra-deadly roads. Even if Long COVID didn't exist, the deaths alone would blow it out of the water.