There's a reason we pay attention to tail risks, where the low-probability negative consequences are far worse than the high-probability costs of averting them. The vast majority of people are not going to die in car crashes, or of SIDS, or of COVID, or from untreated kidney infections. They are lucky. But the consequences of death are so much worse than the costs of wearing a mask, or not seeing your friends in person, or dealing with anxiety, that it's worth taking some precautions even if the chance that you'll die from COVID is low.
No, by definition, they're the norm. They're not lucky, they're just normal. The expected outcome. The people who encounter the tail risks are unlucky.
Not too long ago, a part of a jet fell off over suburban Denver. I would be dismayed if someone -- engineers and investigators -- didn't obsess over this event. But if my brother wants to know if it's safe to get on an airplane, or live in suburban Denver, then my answer is not going to change.
I would also discourage anyone else from reading HN posts with obscure technical documents from Boeing and the FAA, and speculating about what it means for aviation in general. Or reading other peoples' posts on these topics, and sharing anecdotes about how "someone they knew" died in some ghastly aviation accident. And so on.
It is in our nature to exaggerate the importance of rare events. They are still rare.
> But the consequences of death are so much worse than the costs of wearing a mask, or not seeing your friends in person, or dealing with anxiety, that it's worth taking some precautions even if the chance that you'll die from COVID is low.
How did masks get swirled up into this? I swear...people will find any way to turn these things into a political debate. Can we agree that by this point, the debate about masks is fully baked, and no amount of discussion of Covid outcomes is going to change someone's mind?
You can find anecdotes on the internet to support literally any fear that you care to indulge. The point is, most of the time, these fears are not worth indulging, and what you read on the internet exaggerates the actual threat.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying I quite disagree with you that death is so much worse than anything else. Why is death so bad? It's the only certainty you actually have in life. There's an average age of death but you're quite unlikely to die at that specific one. It's gonna come either expectedly (like a cancer diagnosis giving you X months to live) or unexpectedly (an accident). Just accept it and stop trying to fight it by trying to minimize the risk since it'll happen anyways. Instead think about whether there are things you want to prepare for those left behind when you do go. And then stop worrying and enjoy the ride while it lasts. It's just a dice roll anyways, try to have fun! Don't hold back. Challenge yourself, face your fears, jump into the unknown. Don't try to follow the recipe for a perfect harm-free life to the book. That sounds like an insanely boring life to me but I suppose YMMV.
I still hear people worrying about safety despite the fact that half the UK, a large part of the US and countless others have been jabbed. That's after the original trials. I can understand some people's reluctance wrt vaccination. Many countries have had examples of problematic vacc campaigns. In the UK the MMR jab had a major set back due to Andrew Wakefield's false article in the Lancet [1].
From what I gather the thrombosis risk from the Oxford/Astrazeneca jab is somewhat swamped by error bars and open to interpretation. However the risk from the pandemic is very real and demonstrably so. I had my jab last Tues and it was O/AZ but I wont ask anyone to extrapolate much from that!
I haven't backed up my personal data in years and nothing nasty has happened, despite all those catastrophic data-loss stories you read online. I'm all for proportional reporting time, but strangely, no one reports on stories like mine - it's mostly in the vein of "Company shutters after accidental db deletion". I wonder why.