The death distributions are very clear.
If you're healthy, betting that you would be OK is a very reasonable bet.
Long COVID is a big deal, and it apparently affects half of those who get COVID [1]. Furthermore, even double-vaxxed, while protected against hospitalization or death, are still at risk (reduced about 50%) for long COVID [2].
Until/unless Omicron has been proven to have less severe long covid symptoms, yeah I'm treating it with the same caution that I'd do with Delta.
[1] https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/how-many-people-get-... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
Long Covid is not a defined term. It comprises everything from "post-hospitalization syndrome" -- which is something that has existed since long before Covid -- to "slight cough for a few weeks". If you're young (under 65) and otherwise healthy, you are highly unlikely to have anything more than a minor illness. Particularly after vaccination.
Here's a paper that might interest you:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
> In this cross-sectional analysis of 26,823 adults from the population-based French CONSTANCES cohort during the COVID-19 pandemic, self-reported COVID-19 infection was associated with most persistent physical symptoms, whereas laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection was associated only with [loss of smell].
In other words, in a large study out of France, the only "long covid symptom" actually correlated with SARS-CoV2 infection was loss of smell. All of the other various symptoms were associated with self-reported illness, but not confirmed illness.
This is a fairly strong argument that "long covid" is at least partly psychosomatic. We'd probably see this more clearly if the various "long covid" studies didn't rely exclusively on self-reporting of symptoms, and mix together all levels of illness.
To combat this, perhaps we could swap the masks out with gags. /s
Because that's what you do every time you drive. 11 crash fatalities per 100,000 people.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Getting infected with COVID does not.
Same thing with driving; we have a variety of safety precautions - quite a few of them mandatory - involved that help tilt the cost/benefit balance in our favor.
So they will buy carbon indulgences for your corporate trip to Bora Bora but not regular travelers?
You would need to compare the benefits of driving to the benefits of living a normal life, and compare that to the risks of dying from each.
Why would getting infected with COVID have benefits? What are you trying to say?
Why do you think you get a choice? Without extreme measures of staying locked up, most everyone will encounter the virus. Why not help your body deal with it by going for a walk today to get some exercise? Life is to live, not eat ourselves to overweight deaths.
Going to a live game has benefits. Do those not matter?
So many benefits.
This is a ludicrous abuse of statistics. 11 fatalities per 100k people is 11 fatalities per 100k people's worth of trips. That is a few orders of magnitude less than executing 11 people out of every 100k who show up to a stadium.
The OP comparison of Covid to a football game has the same issue, of course.
> Would you go to a game if you knew 243 people were going to be randomly executed at it?
Covid-19 deaths are not randomly distributed. We've known this for nearly two years now.
I'll happily give those odds a miss.
Without knowing your specific background, your numbers are probably much less.
E.g. ages 0-17, there's been 644 deaths. Across a cohort with ~75,000,000 people.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...
Given the option, I'm not taking that bet. I wouldn't play Russian roulette even with a 2000-bullet revolver. Especially when there are pretty simple steps I can take to further minimize the risk.
(It would be nice to have more-- and updated-- data than this. If anyone is aware of a source, I'd love to know about it)
That's also discounting other (and possibly not yet known) complications from getting COVID. There might not be much of any, but we it will be some time before we know that so I wouldn't discount that factor in my risk analysis.
Serious measure to mitigate transmission rates still seems like a very reasonable practice, even for healthy people.
Thank-you for acknowledging the subjectivity of Risk Tolerance.