I’d probably be careful using this as a public health communication tool; you’re comparing these risks to things like flying, which people are viscerally afraid of. Not to mention that the CVST issue is a poorly understood and evolving picture, so it’s hard to confidently assert that the risk is actually a micromort.

The perceptive gap between zero risk and extremely small risk is enormous. If I’m young and healthy, I can easily avoid the additional 1 micromort risk of taking the vaccine by simply not taking it. Now what?

That is of course true, and you're free to weigh up the risks however you like. Also true that there are unknowns. But the benefits of the vaccine are known too, and the risks of COVID include death and long covid, which also has unknowns and does not look nice.

Let me try one more way I have been thinking about it. I'm also weighing up whether I should get the vaccine and TBH made this site as much for myself as anyone else.

The point of the site is really to show the fallacy of there currently being zero risk in your life. Comparing 'none' to 'additional' isn't really what is happening. You have risks in your life every day, every time you do anything.

On any given day you already have about 1 Micromort's chance of dying from any unnatural causes. So that's 365 a year. So getting that vaccine puts it up to 366.

That's an increase in risk of just under 0.3% for the year, from an already pretty low baseline of likelihood of dying that we enjoy these days.

This way of thinking helps me. I'm hoping it might help some others too.

I'm not sure where you're getting your stats, but so far I've gotten

> That's about 10 times less risky than walking down the stairs

and

> That’s the same risk as driving for 5 hours

Which implies that walking down some stairs is equivalently risky to driving for 50 hours. That seems... unlikely.

There are about 150 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles in the US [1]. That means that a micromort (a 1 in a million chance of death) corresponds to about 66 miles driven, which would probably be about 2 hours of driving.

In 2000, 1,307 people died from falling down stairs[2]. The US population in 2000 was about 280 million, so 1307 / 280e6 / 365 = 1.27e-8, so the average person had about a 12.7 in 1 billion chance of dying by falling down stairs on a given day. It seems reasonable to estimate that on average, each American goes down stairs about once per day (some people never go down stairs, others go down them multiple times per day). As such, I think the estimate for "risk of going down the stairs" should be more like 10 in a billion and less like 10 in a million.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

[2] https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm -- "Fall on and from stairs and steps"

Hey thanks for this. I have the sources next to each. Just click the link in the bottom left corner. Let me know if you don't think they're accurate after having a look.

I took the driving risk as being 250 miles of driving with an average 50mph speed (The risk of dying must be higher at high speed so wanted to take a high average to be fair).

The source on the "10x less risky than going down a flight of stairs" is https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2.... That shows that in the UK in 2010, 655 people died from falling down stairs. That translates to a 1 in 100,000 annualized risk from falling down stairs -- the relevant comparison is "10x less risky than using stairs a typical amount for an entire year".

Interestingly, running the numbers for the UK shows that the annualized per-capita risk of dying on stairs in the UK is more than twice as high as it is in the US.

Thanks. I'm going to take that one out. Makes it simpler not to do annual risk. Risk difference UK/US is odd! We thought you guys had it bad with gun crime, and didn't think about the stairs....

To be fair also probably all of these get more likely as age increases. I bet very few 30 year olds dies of falling down the stairs...

This is brilliant, I manage IT systems for hospitals and clinics and hear the front desk staff using analogies like this to put the risk into perspective. For something like this it shouldn't matter if you're even an order of magnitude off, the point is to help the non-mathematically-inclined general population understand how low the risks are in a context they understand (and anecdotally I'd say this strategy works well).

That's really great to hear. Someone I know who works in as a volunteer in the vaccination centre said the same kind of thing as that too.

> If you're not willing to take 1 in a million chances, it's gonna be pretty hard for you to get out of bed today

People's brains don't work that way. It requires a lot of education on probability, and even then the math often conflicts with our instincts.

Yes, and probably staying in bed will have its own risk of blood clots and depression leading to suicide.

This is true, but I find it funny and frustrating that people are so ready to selectively treat rare odds as catastrophic in other circumstances that suit their worldview. For example, urbanists are ready to accept the premise of Vision Zero, which aims to push road fatalities down to zero. Today, there is approximately 1 traffic fatality per 100 million miles traveled in the US. It's so rare that it doesn't deserve attention, but here we are, with people looking to force cars to drive slowly (or ban them outright) to try and chase a world with perfect risk-free conditions. I am betting the same cohort that supports Vision Zero overlaps significantly with the group that thinks none of these vaccines should be paused. I'm sure there are similar examples of logical inconsistency that we can highlight for any political/social cohort as well - that's just one example. But my point is people tend to selectively make data driven arguments only when it suits them.

I don't get your logic? I would have thought people supporting project zero - essentially believing there should be zero risk to any individual at society's expense (having to drive slow) would want the vaccine paused for the same reason. To save individuals from getting a blood clot at the expense of society not being able to reopen.

The only relevant question is is my chances better with covid than with the vacine?

Of course the real answer is to get more phizer and then stop using second rate shit.

I think there is another relevant part to it. I’m probably on the cusp of risk between Covid and vaccine at 39. But getting the vaccine stops it spreading and protects other people and will generally help the would and country get back to normal. So I’ll get the vaccine as soon as it’s offered to me.

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HN classic. upgraded its dyno a bit. Thought cloudflare would save me...

The one thing you miss, what is the risk of dying of COVID, as a healthy person under 30?

I'm not sure about under 30, but if you take natural causes out of it, you have around about the same chance of dying today - check out 'the micromort' for more details!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort#Baseline

Love this work!