> Also congratulations for not caring about a 1 in 200 chance of death.

>> Where's the data to back up any close to an assertion like this?

Latest IFR estimates are between 0.5% and 1.0% (1 in 200 to 1 in 100).

https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...

That's averaged over all ages. For people under 50, it's basically nil, on the order of 1 in 10,000.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...

You are correct. Thanks for pointing it out.

Your reference is very good. It is still a pre-print, but the breakdown is very informative. It estimates the IFR (Table 4) for ages between 0-34 as 0.01% (1 in 10,000), increasing exponentially from there. The estimated IFR for the next age group, people between 34-54, is between 0.04% and 0.2% (1 in 2,500 to 1 in 500), one to two orders of magnitude greater. For people over 85, the IFR is 36.8% (~1 in 3).

Note that the population over 34 is about 50% of the total in the US.

I think people need to dial back a bit and mention that just because you didn't die from infection - doesn't mean you are 100% the way you were pre-infection.

I rarely see mentions too that just because the mortality rate is lower for younger/healthy people - why does that exclude them potentially transmitting it to older folk?

And also possibly getting the most sick you'll ever get in your life, with possible long term effects. Like how exactly does that sound like a reasonable risk to take so you can go to the gym?

I agree completely. It is very easy to dismiss the problem if you are young and you only look at your individual risk. But if you look at society as a whole, the problem is significantly more complicated.

Odd. I see mentions of that literally every time someone brings up the large differences in mortality by age.

It's possible that we mostly exist in different filter bubbles though.

Possibly.. but even this thread I was felt like there were more mentions to just purely stats of IFR by age group as if that was all that matters and they were very active in this thread.

It's good to know it's being brought up when people mention IFR of age groups as if that "proves" we shouldn't worry about it.

An almost meaningless number when not controlled for age, ethnicity, general health etc.

I don't understand how this number can be reasonably used to say anything about basically anything.

From the document you site:

  > Many such serological surveys are currently being
  > undertaken worldwide [10], and some have thus far 
  > suggested substantial under-ascertainment of cases, with estimates of IFR converging at approximately 0.5 - 1% [10-12].

But if we follow reference 12, we get the following IFR study from Stockholm[1]:

  > Results:

  > Age 0–69 Population %: 88.3, IFR: 0.09%
  > Age 70+, Population %: 11.7, IFR: 4.29%

Now, which number applies to the vast majority of us? And this is not even controlled for anything but age.

People, come on.

1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...

You said there was no data available, and I provided a reference.

The data you cite has a large age group as well (0-69), which has the same problem you describe. See the comment by user kmm below for a reference with a better breakdown of estimated IFR by age groups. The reference also shows how the IFR increases exponentially by age.

If you want to see what number applies to you in particular, then you need an specific breakdown. But if you need to see what is the risk for the population in general, then the estimated total IFR, sampled from that same population, is valuable. Think of individual risk vs systemic risk.

I absolutely agree with your general argument about the context of _average_ mortality rate.

However another aspect that is still very nebulious at this point is post-infection sequelae.

Some of the patients who survived SARS-1 infection (in the SARS 2002-2004 outbreak) had lung scaring, loss of VO2 max, and other pulmonary related disfunction, more than 10 years after infection. [0]

We have seen a lot of pre-print articles discussing SARS-COV2 lung damage, heart and blood vessel damage, peripheral nerve damage, etc.

So if we want to be factual and give people a chance of making an informed decision, then we should also take this aspect in consideration.

At this point, we simply don't know enough about who will be affected and how severely but if take what we learned from SARS-COV1, than it is iresponsible not to disclose that life long injury or damage with _varying_ degrees of intensity across potentially multiple systems is very likely for _some_ of the survivors of SARS-COV2.

My point is an informed decision of not following health authority guidelines (which, at this point of social isolation, I do not judge), should not be reduced to something binomial like survival/death, it's just not that simple (as with most things in life).

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7130167/

You want controls for ethnicity, but cite a Swedish public health report.

You realize the impact in the US is dramatically greater amongst the black and brown population?

Possibly due to: the higher likelihood of being in essential jobs in areas with greater population density than Sweden.

Or, you need ethnicity controls because, eugenics?

> Now, which number applies to the vast majority of us? And this is not even controlled for anything but age.

How about instead of focusing solely on the IFR of young people - bring into the conversation how those same young people may not 100% recover.

What about discussing how those same infected young(er) people may not die but they may pass it to other people that aren't so lucky?

>Spoken like somebody with no skin in the game.

I am empathetic to the situation but that's a limited view on "skin". Those who are or have loved ones (colleagues, friends, etc) in the high risk categories also have skin in the game. The 783,000 COVID-19 deaths have permanently affected tens of millions of lives.

There are people with actual skin in the games, you know, their lives. Your business goes under it sucks but you won't die.

Only in America would people legitimately make the argument that it's ok to expose people to risk because people someone is losing money.

Who are you to put a value on my loved ones lives? 1/100 chance, 1/1000 chance, why does any of that matter? Fuck your business, it won't bring my parents back. It won't replace scarred lung tissue in COVID survivors or heal neurological damage.

Preventable death and disability, especially using easy measures like mask wearing and lockdown, should always be preferred over monetary issues.

Modern American values are morally corrupt and disgusting.

You do realize that this "somebody losing money" in the aggregate relates not just to some cliche notion of greedy capitalists getting angry about a few less bags of money. Instead it literally means economic ruin possibly hitting millions of people and less directly causing tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, not to mention destroyed families, individual lives and all sorts of psychological and social consequences that go far, far beyond simple greed.

Everything in the world fits along some scale of costs and benefits, and your emotional reaction shouldn't get to ignore that. Your loved ones lives literally do have to balance against the possible consequences to the lives of other people and their own loved ones due to one set of policies vs. another.

By your basic logic of who is anyone to put a value on people's lives due to varying risks of X negative thing happening, we could ban a whole pile of things that people need because somewhere, somehow, these things will indeed cause some people to die. I'm not comparing it to the current severity of COVID, but the flue alone kills tens to hundreds of thousands per year. Does this mean that the whole world should be annually locked down against relatively marginal risks?

The economic debate around the costs of quarantine isn't just about modern american values being "corrupt and disgusting", it's a global consideration that I promise you, billions of people are deeply worrying about in many other countries.. I live moving between two different countries that aren't the United States and which both make many cultural efforts to separate their values from those of Americans, and in both of them, the domestic economic question is causing the same enormous worry and resistance to prolonged quarantines that millions of Americans are also worried about..

I mean, what modern specifically american values? Being able to stay economically solvent? No dude, that's worldwide, and especially among vast parts of the population that don't live under a strong social safety net or with the privilege of enough money or work-from-home opportunities to comfortably sit out the pandemic while criticizing others as greedy.

Yeah, no.

Filing for bankruptcy will never, ever be equivalent to someone dying from willful negligence because you wanted to keep you business open.

Full stop. There's no argument you could make, it's never going to be equivalent and there's nothing you can say that will balance that out.

I say again, fuck your business. Any size of business. Small family business, large corporation, hot dog stand. If you can't it open, safely, without getting people killed, then you're toast.

Any argument you make is just muddying the waters. This is very clear and unambiguous.

You're either being deliberately emotional and obtuse, or you're trolling, because your argument is so absolutist that it becomes absurd.

It even works against itself, like so, to rephrase your own words: "If you can't shut down the economy and force all normal social activity to cease without getting people killed, then you're toast"

Since you obviously can't claim that your extreme insistence doesn't cause such a level of harm (and it would, directly or indirectly), somebody else could argue just as forcefully against your own idea because it will destroy their lives or lead to the death of some loved one. This is why I mentioned the very important question of balancing harms and outcomes. How can that be so hard to understand on a rational level?

As the other reply said, virtually any activity can be deadly in some context and it's impossible to promise it can't possibly be. This was the case before COVID and it's the case now too. I assume you participated in normal social and economic activity before the pandemic, thus you could also call yourself a hypocrite in cherry picking your starting point for moral outrage.

You're not even engaging with the parent's point.

This logic does not work. You must make a choice to balance risks, because EVERYTHING has risks. Aggregate economic ruin kills people.

By your logic, you shouldn't be able to sell cars, food, practice medicine, go for a walk, run, play sports, do ANYTHING AT ALL because all of these things could injure or kill you or others.

go for a run. you don't have to go to a gym. there are plenty of ways to exercise outside and if you choose not to do them during a pandemic and instead choose to put the lives of others at risk so you can be inside a building, you're a jerk

Our approach isn’t working for people. No amount of scolding is going to change that.