Your risk of dying is, accepting the 0.37% for the sake of argument, 0.37% if you're infected. The actual chance of anyone, even of someone in a more dangerous demographic, of dying of Covid in their lifetime is significantly lower than that.

Additionally, I believe the 1% chance of dying in a car crash is over the course of a lifetime. A 55 year old has likely lived well over half their life and has also aged past a significant chunk of the riskiest time to be in a car (likely 16-30).

> Your risk of dying is, accepting the 0.37% for the sake of argument, 0.37% if you're infected. The actual chance of anyone, even of someone in a more dangerous demographic, of dying of Covid in their lifetime is significantly lower than that.

I personally believe that given the R0 and the large number of asymptomatic cases, there's no putting this genie back in the bag, and I agree with prominent epidemiologists that we're all going to get it one way or the other -- because nobody's going to stay inside the 18 months it'll take to develop a widespread vaccine. That's why I support Sweden's model. [1] So I just rounded up to 100% and projected out.

> Additionally, I believe the 1% chance of dying in a car crash is over the course of a lifetime. A 55 year old has likely lived well over half their life and has also aged past a significant chunk of the riskiest time to be in a car (likely 16-30).

Good point! I wonder if it's a bimodal distribution. I assume older folks can't get out of the way fast enough as pedestrians and are more likely to get into accidents when driving.

[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

You support Sweden's model of ignoring the issue? Not only do they still have a high exponential growth rate, as well as exponentially increasing death counts, but their CFR is atrocious. Also the link in your footnote is extremely outdated, and doesn't mention anything about Sweden.

Sweden has actually leveled off and had flat new case growth over the last week [1], same as in Canada where they have shut the world down (in terms of flatness not numbers). Further CFR is almost exclusively based on age of acquisition and the extent to which hospitals are available. In Sweden hospitals are available. The disease is exactly the same everywhere so it’s much more to do with demographics.

I mean they’ve had 15000 recorded cases (of course since they’re letting the disease roam free without a general population testing regimen that’s going to be a minuscule fraction of the denominator which they expect to reach 7 million ish) and 1500 deaths. Crude CFR is 10%.

Bloomberg and the government as of 10 hours ago claim their strategy of “ignoring” a disease that’s just not that fatal is working great, and that unlike the rest of the world they’ll never have to deal with it again as they’re en route to developing herd immunity. [2]

IMO it’s becoming more and more clear that we collectively lost our minds in panic over something that’s just not that bad. The Swedish model is one to replicate.

[1] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...

Do you even check your numbers? Sweden has over 1500 deaths to date.

Your just cherry picking numbers and extrapolating to fit your conclusions. Their CFR is 10% now. 10%. That's extraordinary. You can't dismiss their current stats and then say they don't have a genpop testing regimen as a means of supporting your claims.

And even if you get "lucky" with a crude CFR of 1%, that's disastrous. If just 50% become infected, that's 50K deaths, not 500. And another 250-500K hospitalizations with long lasting effects.

(1) The books you claimed I was cooking were typos (notice they were off by one character each?). I've updated the post to reflect what I intended, so thanks for calling that out.

(2) Let's use our noodle for a sec greedo.

They haven't been attempting to control the spread of COVID, and you're telling me they only have 15,000 cases out of a population of 10,000,000 when the R0 is between 2 and 3? Do you genuinely believe that it's not a lack of proper testing? When Gangelt had a seropositive rate of 15% and Santa Clara has 2-5% previously infected?

That would make the denominator not 15,000 but 200,000-1,500,000 or 0.75% to 0.1% which is again in line with IFR estimates we've been seeing lately. Worse than the flu, certainly, but not devastating.

Frankly, that's probably a conservative denominator.

Second as I explained in a peer post, trying to establish the infection fatality rate of the disease based on its case fatality rate is like trying to figure out how risky skydiving is by setting your denominator at "whoever shows up in hospital with skydiving injuries" and the numerator at "whoever survives" -- it's peak adverse selection bias. Can you imagine the government of Sweden telling the population that 1 in 10 of them will die and them being okay with this plan? haha.

Studies are pinning the infection fatality rate at between 0.25% and 1%, and more often than not in the lower quartile of that band -- and almost all of those deaths are the old and sick who should be isolated and protected.

Further, because so many people don't have symptoms and it's so contagious, and the vaccine is at least 12-18 months away, we are all going to get it. Well 70% of us anyways. Sweden is front-loading this burden. Basically none of the numbers are directly comparable, as the minute the US re-opens it'll be playing whack-a-mole with city/state level shutdowns as China is.

Sweden will not.

Not really actually! In your age category 50-59 your case fatality rate is 1.3% [1] and given the way it affects the older end of the band more significantly than yourself in the middle of the band, it wouldn't be at all unlikely that your case fatality rate is right around 1%.

Further, we have been seeing anywhere from 30-80% of cases are asymptomatic or result in mild flulike symptoms and therefore not accounted for in case fatality rates. Indeed the Gangelt study put the overall infection fatality rate at 0.37% when Germany's case fatality rate is around 2%. It wouldn't surprise me at all if your risk was about 7X lower than the stated 1.3%, as low as 0.25%

I also wouldn't be so quick to assume car crashes are a pleasant way to go.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

> In your age category 50-59 your case fatality rate is 1.3%

Most of the passengers on the Diamond Princes cruise ship were 65+ years old.

Only 0.23% of the passengers died after Covid-19 outbreak.

I worry about car crashes too! :-)

That's a very reasonable reaction.

Germany's CFR is north of 3% now, and steadily climbing.

CFR is not IFR, it's not even particularly helpful or meaningful because it varies so much by demographics and hospital capacity.