I started my reply with the words "Either there's something very unusual about your personal situation...". So can you give an example of comorbidities that you

I started my reply with the words "Either there's something very unusual about your personal situation...". So can you give an example of comorbidities that you wouldn't consider very unusual, and your estimate of the probability that the mother would die if the child were infected in that case? Remember that: 1. The secondary household attack rate is far less than 100%; the paper I cited found 18% for people >= 60 years old sharing the same address. So even if the child becomes infected, the mother probably wouldn't be. 2. Most eighty-year-olds have a lot of comorbidities already, so the IFR for that age group accounts for that. Assuming only that the mother is in the oldest age category from each paper and the probabilities are independent, I get a probability that the mother dies if the child is infected of 1.4%. Comorbidities can indeed drive that higher, and maybe there's some dependence (sicker people both more likely to catch the coronavirus and more likely to die from it); but I think you'll find it very hard to build a plausible set of assumptions that would get you to "almost certainly", unless the mother is so sick that she's likely to die soon regardless. (Of course, that wouldn't mean her life is without value. But it would mean that when we decide we can't do something until a vaccine is available, we're deciding she can't do it ever again in her life. If it were my life, then I'd judge that calculation differently.) Most discussion of probability of death feels rather ghoulish, and the above is no exception. All of us will die, though, and it's a question only of what we can do in the time before that. I'd rather plan that time using the best empirical estimates we can make than with half-informed hyperbole. Wouldn't you?