5 ms·

> 1 in 200 chance of death (pretty high by the way) The fatality rate of a car crash is also about 0.5% [1], but that doesn't prevent us from driving. That mea

> 1 in 200 chance of death (pretty high by the way) The fatality rate of a car crash is also about 0.5% [1], but that doesn't prevent us from driving. That means there's a piece of the puzzle missing here, right? Note that I'm not concluding this means we should go to gyms (or whatever). I'm just pointing out your analysis is missing an important factor, making it faulty/unconvincing. Edit: Changed the statistic source, because it wasn't measuring what I thought it was measuring. (Which incidentally also gets at the same distinction I was trying to make in my comment.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

diabeetusman 6y ago
That's over your entire lifetime, not a few weeks after getting infected. You don't have a 1% chance of dying in a car accident every time you drive.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  You're right, but unfortunately it's beside my point. (I took "chances of dying in a car crash" to mean it was the fatality rate of a car crash, which was wrong.) I was trying to find the chances of dying given you have a car crash, not the chances of being in a car crash and dying. (Which I guess leads to the spoiler: this was the distinction I was trying to make. That you can't just draw a conclusion from only looking at the former, which is what that 1% figure is. You need to look at the chances of getting the disease as well.) I updated the quoted source.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    > I was trying to find the chances of dying given you have a car crash, not the chances of being in a car crash and dying. That seems a weird statistic to seek out, because your conclusion would then be "...and we don't try to avoid getting in car crashes to avoid that 0.5% risk of death". Which is wrong, we do and we should try to avoid crashes.
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      No, not really. "We" (as in normal people, not e.g. automakers) don't "try to avoid getting in car crashes" to nearly such a degree as with COVID. We live our everyday lives and drive anyway, and doing pretty much whatever we want, except maybe a little slower (due to speed limits), staying within lanes, and while avoiding imminent dangers that pop up on the road. With COVID we're told to stay home and just scrap everything altogether. The response is entirely different, and is not warranted by just comparing those statistics. You need to include the other pieces as well.
    - Natsu 6y ago
      Maybe a better example would be all the people who pay thousands to climb Everest. The mortality rate there is something like 1.3%.
ImaCake 6y ago
>The chances of dying in a car crash are 1%, but that doesn't prevent us from driving. I don't think that statistic is even close to right. I know exactly zero people who have died in a car crash. Many of them are quite old. The Australian statistics suggest that the odds of anyone in Australia dying of a car crash are 0.0000478 per person per year. This is considerably smaller than your statistic and so I am going to dispute it, at the risk of you thinking I am stupid.
- syshum 6y ago
  I take your anecdote, and raise my own as I have had several family members die in a car crash, and zero die of Covid soo.... Your anecdote is not more valid than mine. >>The Australian statistics it seems Australian drive about 30% fewer miles per year on average; in the US the risk of death in Auto Accident is 1 in 106, or .95% which I think is close enough to 1% to give the Grand Parent a little slack
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    Lifetime odds. They were projecting 3 million may have died if we did nothing over a matter of months; 100 years worth of auto fatalities..
    - syshum 6y ago
      I think we can safely say at this point that those projections were widely inaccurate and have been dis proven several times now as they were based on a completely inaccurate and incomplete data set.
      - ImaCake 6y ago
        >incomplete data set They were. The COVID deaths in the USA are about double what has been reported. Not a conspiracy, just a reality of how the deaths are coded due to testing constraints.
      - Rapzid 6y ago
claudeganon 6y ago
Car crashes don’t spread car crashes to others, silently and multiplicatively. Exponential risks are not the same as individual ones.
jdavis703 6y ago
I think this is comparing the lifetime chance of various causes of death against the chance of death by COVID-19 complications after getting infected. In fact, the original report says it's too soon to know what the actual risk of COVID-19 related death is.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
  To be fair if we don't control this thing you have a near 100% chance if catching covid at some point in the next few months. Assuming we have an effective vaccine in 6 months you would then have a near 0% chance of catching covid again. This works out to the lifetime chance of death being the IFR. So between 1/1000 to 1/100 (depending on which study for IFR you look at). If we don't develop an effective vaccine then given immunity seems to be temporary (as with other coronaviruses) most of us will catch this every year so a really high proportion of us will die of covid eventually (where eventually is in many years).
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    > To be fair if we don't control this thing you have a near 100% chance if catching covid at some point in the next few months. By "near 100% chance" here do you mean the fraction of the population getting the disease, or the likelihood of getting the disease even if you take the appropriate precautions? Or to put it another way: imagine 1% of the population taking all the ideal precautions for the next year (and only going outside fro obvious necessities, like food/groceries/etc.). Will they also have a near 100% chance of getting it in your model? Or does 100% merely refer to # of infections / population?
    - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
      The rate at which this thing grows took London from a fraction of a perentage to 5-10% infected at the same time in about 4 weeks. It could have easily hit 30-50% of people infected at the same time in another 2 weeks without the lockdown. Unless you literally shut in and careful wash and disinfect all your deliveries during the period when your delivery driver has a 1 in approx 5 chance of being an asymptomatic (but infectious carrier) you are nearly certain to catch it.
Ensorceled 6y ago
> though if you're disputing the specific numbers, you're missing my point I'll bite ... what is your point? Approximately 30000 people die a year in car accidents a year in the US, COVID has killed 170K in six months. What's the missing piece you are trying to bring to the table?
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  The probability of dying given you have the disease (/car crash) is not what you need to look at. You need to include the chances of actually getting the disease (/being in a car crash) in the first place, is my point.
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    Ok. Almost 6 million US car accidents a year, just over 5 million US COVID cases, so car accidents are about 1/5 as lethal as COVID on a per capita basis. Currently the US yearly car crash chance is about the same as a COVID infection. Car crashes are fairly constant, COVID cases are still increasing this year. I do wonder how the critical injury vs. lasting COVID complications will workout.
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      Yeah, that's what you need to compare, and that's why just looking at those statistics in isolation doesn't lead to a definite conclusion. But now that we're comparing apples to apples, and see the apples are comparable, we need to move on from them to look at other factors. And like you said, the growth rate is one such huge factor. So, really, I find the growth rate to be a much more compelling argument for treating them differently than the death rate. Though even that isn't airtight: for example, if wearing a mask would practically guarantee you didn't get the virus, and the spread of infection was merely due to people not taking such precautions in social interactions, then that could change everything. And unfortunately I don't know what the actual effectiveness is, so I can't comment on that—though personally I'm skeptical they're as airtight as we'd hope (even skeptical about N95). All of which is to say: there's a good case to be made, and I'm not even against it, but (a) on the one hand, it's not nearly as open-and-shut as just comparing the (mismatched) statistics in the original comment, and (b) conversely, when there are more compelling arguments, it's so much better to make those arguments instead of comparing apples and oranges.

diabeetusman 6y ago

That's over your entire lifetime, not a few weeks after getting infected. You don't have a 1% chance of dying in a car accident every time you drive.

mehrdadn 6y ago
You're right, but unfortunately it's beside my point. (I took "chances of dying in a car crash" to mean it was the fatality rate of a car crash, which was wrong.) I was trying to find the chances of dying given you have a car crash, not the chances of being in a car crash and dying. (Which I guess leads to the spoiler: this was the distinction I was trying to make. That you can't just draw a conclusion from only looking at the former, which is what that 1% figure is. You need to look at the chances of getting the disease as well.) I updated the quoted source.
- dmurray 6y ago
  > I was trying to find the chances of dying given you have a car crash, not the chances of being in a car crash and dying. That seems a weird statistic to seek out, because your conclusion would then be "...and we don't try to avoid getting in car crashes to avoid that 0.5% risk of death". Which is wrong, we do and we should try to avoid crashes.
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    No, not really. "We" (as in normal people, not e.g. automakers) don't "try to avoid getting in car crashes" to nearly such a degree as with COVID. We live our everyday lives and drive anyway, and doing pretty much whatever we want, except maybe a little slower (due to speed limits), staying within lanes, and while avoiding imminent dangers that pop up on the road. With COVID we're told to stay home and just scrap everything altogether. The response is entirely different, and is not warranted by just comparing those statistics. You need to include the other pieces as well.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    Maybe a better example would be all the people who pay thousands to climb Everest. The mortality rate there is something like 1.3%.

ImaCake 6y ago

>The chances of dying in a car crash are 1%, but that doesn't prevent us from driving. I don't think that statistic is even close to right. I know exactly zero people who have died in a car crash. Many of them are quite old. The Australian statistics suggest that the odds of anyone in Australia dying of a car crash are 0.0000478 per person per year. This is considerably smaller than your statistic and so I am going to dispute it, at the risk of you thinking I am stupid.

syshum 6y ago
I take your anecdote, and raise my own as I have had several family members die in a car crash, and zero die of Covid soo.... Your anecdote is not more valid than mine. >>The Australian statistics it seems Australian drive about 30% fewer miles per year on average; in the US the risk of death in Auto Accident is 1 in 106, or .95% which I think is close enough to 1% to give the Grand Parent a little slack
- Rapzid 6y ago
  Lifetime odds. They were projecting 3 million may have died if we did nothing over a matter of months; 100 years worth of auto fatalities..
  - syshum 6y ago
    I think we can safely say at this point that those projections were widely inaccurate and have been dis proven several times now as they were based on a completely inaccurate and incomplete data set.
    - ImaCake 6y ago
      >incomplete data set They were. The COVID deaths in the USA are about double what has been reported. Not a conspiracy, just a reality of how the deaths are coded due to testing constraints.
    - Rapzid 6y ago

claudeganon 6y ago

Car crashes don’t spread car crashes to others, silently and multiplicatively. Exponential risks are not the same as individual ones.

jdavis703 6y ago

I think this is comparing the lifetime chance of various causes of death against the chance of death by COVID-19 complications after getting infected. In fact, the original report says it's too soon to know what the actual risk of COVID-19 related death is.

gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
To be fair if we don't control this thing you have a near 100% chance if catching covid at some point in the next few months. Assuming we have an effective vaccine in 6 months you would then have a near 0% chance of catching covid again. This works out to the lifetime chance of death being the IFR. So between 1/1000 to 1/100 (depending on which study for IFR you look at). If we don't develop an effective vaccine then given immunity seems to be temporary (as with other coronaviruses) most of us will catch this every year so a really high proportion of us will die of covid eventually (where eventually is in many years).
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  > To be fair if we don't control this thing you have a near 100% chance if catching covid at some point in the next few months. By "near 100% chance" here do you mean the fraction of the population getting the disease, or the likelihood of getting the disease even if you take the appropriate precautions? Or to put it another way: imagine 1% of the population taking all the ideal precautions for the next year (and only going outside fro obvious necessities, like food/groceries/etc.). Will they also have a near 100% chance of getting it in your model? Or does 100% merely refer to # of infections / population?
  - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
    The rate at which this thing grows took London from a fraction of a perentage to 5-10% infected at the same time in about 4 weeks. It could have easily hit 30-50% of people infected at the same time in another 2 weeks without the lockdown. Unless you literally shut in and careful wash and disinfect all your deliveries during the period when your delivery driver has a 1 in approx 5 chance of being an asymptomatic (but infectious carrier) you are nearly certain to catch it.

Ensorceled 6y ago

> though if you're disputing the specific numbers, you're missing my point I'll bite ... what is your point? Approximately 30000 people die a year in car accidents a year in the US, COVID has killed 170K in six months. What's the missing piece you are trying to bring to the table?

mehrdadn 6y ago
The probability of dying given you have the disease (/car crash) is not what you need to look at. You need to include the chances of actually getting the disease (/being in a car crash) in the first place, is my point.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Ok. Almost 6 million US car accidents a year, just over 5 million US COVID cases, so car accidents are about 1/5 as lethal as COVID on a per capita basis. Currently the US yearly car crash chance is about the same as a COVID infection. Car crashes are fairly constant, COVID cases are still increasing this year. I do wonder how the critical injury vs. lasting COVID complications will workout.
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    Yeah, that's what you need to compare, and that's why just looking at those statistics in isolation doesn't lead to a definite conclusion. But now that we're comparing apples to apples, and see the apples are comparable, we need to move on from them to look at other factors. And like you said, the growth rate is one such huge factor. So, really, I find the growth rate to be a much more compelling argument for treating them differently than the death rate. Though even that isn't airtight: for example, if wearing a mask would practically guarantee you didn't get the virus, and the spread of infection was merely due to people not taking such precautions in social interactions, then that could change everything. And unfortunately I don't know what the actual effectiveness is, so I can't comment on that—though personally I'm skeptical they're as airtight as we'd hope (even skeptical about N95). All of which is to say: there's a good case to be made, and I'm not even against it, but (a) on the one hand, it's not nearly as open-and-shut as just comparing the (mismatched) statistics in the original comment, and (b) conversely, when there are more compelling arguments, it's so much better to make those arguments instead of comparing apples and oranges.