In the UK and US about 0.2-0.3% of the population have died of this thing and we're almost certainly over the worst of it (e.g. annual death rates will be lower going forward) due to vaccination.

It doesn't matter how many times people are fed the stats - they just have different opinions. To some people that's a big number, to others it's trivial.

I have found no way to bridge this gap, it's probably the main reason that I've found the past two years difficult.

You either think it's a non issue because 1-2% of people die every year anyway, or you think it's the worst thing ever because... well I don't know, but lots of people think that and want us to reduce our quality of life dramatically to try and combat it.

I think it’s because your stats are off.

“The age-adjusted death rate decreased by 1.1% from 731.9 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2017 to 723.6 in 2018.”

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm

So that’s an overall death rate of 0.7% in the US pre COVID. If the death rate becomes 1%-2% with COVID, that’s an increase of 50% - 200% in the number of people dying.

That’s … not negligible.

Whether you think that should affect your “quality of life” I think depends a lot on your level of empathy.

150K in the UK have died of coronavirus, we have 67 million, that's 0.22%, and most of that was pre-vaccine.

I can't really be bothered to trawl US stats, but I imagine the figures are about the same. Let's say it's 0.3%.

I just don't think that reducing our average annual risk of death by 0.3% is worth doing stuff like locking ourselves indoors or just not doing anything communally any more.

It's _our_ quality of life, fwiw - I'm not the only person that exists, restrictions affect everyone and empathy is applicable to all scenarios.

edit: actually, it's not even annually 0.3%, because it's now been ~21 months since coronavirus hit our shores, so we're looking at ~0.12% or so annually.

As of December, 95% of US adults aged over 65 had gotten at least one vaccine dose and 87% two doses [1] which is considered "fully vaccinated" at this point. Seems like the group it affects most is taking the pandemic really seriously.

One thing that surprises me is how much I hear about 'anti-vax' rhetoric, however, when push comes to shove, the people with the highest risk are exceedingly receptive to the vaccine. Maybe the 'anti-vaxers' are just a very loud minority after all.

1- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254250/share-of-older-u...

Just in case, I'm barely in my 20s and vaccinated.

Well, here in Ontario 80% of the population has had the injections, yet 90% of the people in the ICUs are people who had no injection. The difference is something to think about.

Yeah, sure, I'm in no way downplaying the health risks of the younger group that get infected or that unvaccinated folks are straining the healthcare system. Was just making a slight observation ...the high vaccination rate on the 65+ cohort gives me assurance that the majority of people take the pandemic seriously and do their best to help stop the spread

Perhaps COVID has let us learn two things about younger folks: Independent of whether they should be concerned, they're not concerned about novel respiratory diseases which spread quickly. Also, unfortunately, they don't give much of a sh*t about the risk of their actions affecting the lives of those older than themselves.

Who needs empathy when we have Facebook?

Resiliency and capacity to overcome serious health issues. 25% were not over 65. That's huge. This profile probably echoes the ratio for many serious infectious diseases survival once you exclude infant mortality.

Not sure if it's more concerning like that or like "25% of the 800k Americans who died of Covid-19 were under 65 years old".

Or 200,000 younger people also died. Those numbers are not to be brushed off.