It seems to me that you're one of those not understanding COVID death rates, though.

Firstly, even though I doubt your number a bit, even a 1/200 chance of death is mighty high enough for most people to seek treatment for something.

Secondly, if you're already infected, the pill is probably less risky than those 1/200.

Thirdly, the chance of death isn't equal for everyone. A healthy young person might have a 10x reduced risk, while an older person with an existing condition a 10x increased risk. So at least for one of them the new medicine is clearly worth trying.

> A healthy young person might have a 10x reduced risk

The risk doubles every 7 years so it's going to be ~18x between generations, and much greater beyond that. Those who are old and have existing co-morbidities are really pushing the difference as severity of disease is strongly correlated with number and severity of co-morbidities.

Edit: ~18x, not ~30x. It's late here, I can't calculate 2 to the power of 4 without a calculator until I sleep, wake up, and have a strong coffee.

People think 0.5% is low, but e.g. JFK airport has about 500 takeoffs a day, if on average every day 2 or 3 planes that flew out of JFK crashed, how would they feel about air travel?

I think part of the problem is people see getting covid as something that will only happen to them once. So it is easy for them to think "well, if JFK had that many crashes, but I only had to fly once in my life, that's not so bad."

Realistically, re-infection is going to become more and more of a thing. Especially as it mutates.

GP stated that "the consequence of not taking it is death", which is demonstrably false, and specifically what I was referring to.

Also, the current mortality rate overall in the USA for Covid is less than 0.1% - in fact it's less than 0.02%. 46M confirmed cases, and 751k deaths (not all confirmed to be caused by COVID)...

A 1/200 chance of death is gigantic.

Right!

It floors me to see so many not internalizing what that means.

So are the people who land in that numerator - a correlation that's not permitted in the public discourse apparently.

The study was for patients “who were at high risk of progressing to severe illness”, where the hospitalization/death rate was 6.7% without it and 1% with. You probably wouldn’t give it out to everyone but that’s the kind of risk decision doctors make routinely.

The actual death rate for the trial cohort is close to 2%:

Pfizer said 0.8 percent of patients who got the drug combination within three days were hospitalized within four weeks — three out of 389 patients — compared to 7 percent of patients who got placebos, or 27 out of 385. And seven of those who got placebos died, Pfizer said. No one who got the treatment died within a month.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/pfizers-new-covid-pi...

If the drug has got this far into testing, there is no chance in hell that it has >0.5% chance of death (or other awful side-effects) on ingestion. So it's an upgrade either way.

If this drug is administered in the hospital, you already have a severe case and are far more likely to die.