It's the other way around - for any given chance of you getting COVID, there's a (to use your number) 3% mortality rate - if you take the vaccine - that outcome changes because you now have much smaller risk of infection, to 0.15% chance.

Your choice is between 3% and 0.15% - not 95% and 97%.

I don't think this individualistic way of looking at things is sound, though. First 3% mortality sounds way high - even given health system collapse (basically turning every ventilator survivor into a dead patient).

And on the other hand, mostly the old and those with pre-conditions will die - we alltake the vaccine to protect everyone. That way we might avoid a population wide 0.5% (or thereabouts) mortality rate.

That would still 1 in 200 - most people would likely know a handful of people dying from the disease if there's no mitigation.

> Your choice is between 3% and 0.15% - not 95% and 97%.

I would put it differently: if we become covid carriers, we become spreaders. Those 3% are, thus, applied to a large population comprised of everyone we interact ina daily basis.

Thus even if at most the likelihood that we die of covid is only 3% tops, the likelihood that at least one person that catches covid from us does is proportional to the number of people we infect.

With a 3% fatality rate, the likelihood that at least one person we infect will die can reach 80% if we spread it to over 50 people.

If we infect someone over 60, the likelihood that they will die from covid grows from that 3% to about 20%.

So unless you are infected while living in a bubble, the real risk is far higher.

I live in a US state with essentially no lock down measures in place. Companies around me are going out of business by the dozen. These companies are not going out of business due to any government mandate they are going out of business because of economic uncertainty and people not spending as they dont want to go to places and potentially get sick. I used to spend ~$500 a month on eating out, I spend almost zero now as I dont want to take the risk. This has nothing to do with government choices and fully to do with mine. Now multiply this by tens of thousands of other people making the same choice and you will understand why an effective widely used vaccine is important for an economic recovery. Until the virus is under control I and many others will severely curtail our spending and there will be only a limited economic recovery.

In addition I dont go out as I have elderly relatives who I dont want to sicken, they dont expect it, its my choice. So blaming others for being selfish is really missing the point and is an illustration of not really understanding the current economic situation.

Your point is perfectly true, but there is also one more thing to consider. It is possible for the health care system to get overworked like they did in NYC and North Italy. There are signs it could happens in other places in the US now like Wisconsin.

At that point everything else suddenly becomes critical, because there is no ICU left.

Also, at least in CA, doctors/hospitals/dentists etc are only doing what is critical right now to avoid the whole hospital going into lockdown. That has large consequences for health outcomes and for the economy of those practises.

To add some data to that: there is a correlation between disease spread and GDP reduction, and it's the one that consistent with your anecdote: The economic impact is greater where the disease is left unchecked :

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-health-economy, and then specificaly this scatterplot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirme...

(unfortunately, the graph doesn't include countries like china, vietnam, and many other asian countries, because that would make the trend even clearer.)

average of 17 pedestrians are killed by cars in the US every day (data from 2018). Over 1,000 people per day are dying from covid in the US. So your odds of dying crossing the road on any given day are actually far, far less than your odds of dying from covid...

I think it's easy to look at a mortality rate of half a percent, and think "no big deal" - but it really is. One in every 200 people dying would mean most of us have a close connection to a couple of victims.

And there's already more dead from covid-19 in the US than casualties during the Vietnam War. Granted, more elderly people than young, but it's still a bit difficult to accept that it's insignificant.

Add to this what could happen with an exponential surge, with icus being over-run - and a) you'd end up being more likely to die from other causes, like a traffic accident - and b) many of the current covid-19 survivors would end up as casualties.

https://time.com/5843349/coronavirus-death-toll-100000/

You sound like a child. No one is panicking, the problem is it's killing people and hospitalizing even more people to the point of overrunning hospitals.

Very very few hospitals have actually been overrun. Many were and still are empty (or flooding in with people who couldn't get treatment for other things during the lockdowns). The cases in NYC, Michigan and Kirkland (Seattle) were all due to orders that packed elderly care facilities with sick. Governors Whitmer and Cuomo made huge mistakes with their orders and neither is owing up to it.

The problem is that with the infection spreading exponentially you might have hospitals half empty one day and at 200% a week later.

Here in Czech Republic it looks like we managed to avoid running out of capacity during the ongoing second wave, but just. The measures taken included canceling any elective and non-life-threatening surgeries, drafting medical school students, many foreign doctors that came to help and moving covid patients in critical state from overloaded hospitals hospitals.

We even built two full field hospitals which we will thankfully not need as it looks like. BTW, building one of them took about a week - which you migh not have, once you hit exponential growth. Not to mention having spare medical personnel to run it.

How many elective procedures are happening across America? Hint: not many.

All that you say makes sense. But hey we live in an irrational world (my based opinion).

Good luck surviving among a bunch of simians, who think they have figured it all out.

> Why would I want a vaccine that is actually less effective than my chances of surviving?

Well, the vaccine hopefully doesn't kill you if it's ineffective, so the numbers aren't exactly comparable.

The reasoning in this comment is wild. Let's take it back to the math a moment:

Let's take your 3% chance of death (actually the population survival rate is significantly higher IIRC, but OTOH there's long haul COVID to consider too). If the vaccine is 95% effective, all else being equal you have a 3% chance of death without the vaccine, and a 0.15% chance of death with the vaccine. So the question becomes: is there a greater than 2.85% chance of the vaccine killing you or doing you crippling injury? If not, you're probably better off taking the vaccine.

Numbers depend on the age. Bulk of deaths are concentrated in older populations. CDC recently updated estimated infection fatality rates for COVID. Here are the updated survival rates by age group:

0-19: 99.997% 20-49: 99.98% 50-69: 99.5% 70+: 94.6%

Edit - typo.

The CDC updated their pandemic planning scenarios[0] based on earlier studies in Europe plus some educated guesswork using data collected from the US through August 8. The numbers which you represent as the CDC’s sole official estimate of true IFR are only one of three possible sets of parameters that they provide for scenario modelling. Furthermore, the footnote on these estimates states “The estimates for persons ≥70 years old presented here do not include persons ≥80 years old”, since the underlying study they base the model on assumed that CFR = IFR for people ≥80 years old. Why they label this 70+ instead of 70–79 is beyond me, and I have no idea how sound the methodology is that they used to derive these estimates.

I would also mention that there are studies in peer review on patient populations in the United States which suggest IFRs closer to CDC planning scenario 4/5 than 3—for example, this one from Connecticut[1]:

  18-29 0.01 (0.01–NE)
  30-44 0.11 (0.06–1.74)
  45-54 0.18 (0.11–0.63)
  55-64 1.30 (0.68–16.94)
  ≥65 16.46 (6.58–NE)

We all hope for the best—that the lower bounds are true—but I think we should also be prepared for the reality that the upper bounds might be the correct ones, and act conservatively.

Also, you know, all IFR estimates assume that patients will actually be able to access care. Without hospitals, IFR approaches IHR, and the hospitalisation rates from the Connecticut study are grim: 0.8%, 2.68%, 3.09%, 12.43%, and 79.89%.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.30.20223461v...

" if you told someone they had a 97% chance of winning at a casino, they'd be down there in a flash" this is a bad analogy, what if you also told them that if they lost they were taken out back and shot? I bet a lot fewer people would show up. In this particular case, winning just means not dying, if I could increase my odds of not dying I would probably do so.

Also there is no proof that getting covid grants lifetime immunity, so lets assume immunity lasts a year, every year you now have a 3% chance of dying from covid using your numbers. 3% is not that low, there is a ~3% chance of rolling double sixes with 2 dice, and that happens all the time.

Your IJME link does not support in any way your assertion about the "danger" of the HPV vaccine. From the link, 30,000 were vaccinated. Three girls died for reasons that are never stated. The article provides that "there is no conclusive evidence of a causal link between the vaccine and the deaths."

> Pfizer is bascially responsible for the oxycontin epidemic. Their reps bribe doctors into pushing their drugs.

That was Purdue Pharma, not Pfizer.

I take the general gist of some of your points, but it might be worth reframing some of your logic. To take just one point, let's go to the casino: you have a 97% chance of winning...pretty great! The downside is that if you lose, we take you out back and shoot you. Do you still want to go?