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> If you're below 40 your risk of dying of the regular influenza is higher than the risk of dying of covid-19. Do you have a source for that? As far as I'm aw

• henrikschroder 6y ago
  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2
  • LarvaFX 6y ago
    That does not compare flu to covid19.
    • henrikschroder 6y ago
      Good thing you posted a comparison graph then, too bad that the covid-19 numbers in your graph are old and outdated. The Nature article has risk of death for 0-19yo at about 0%, while your graph has flu deaths at 0.01% for that group. Which means the flu is more dangerous for kids than covid-19. The Nature article has risk of death for 20-40yo at ~0.02%, same as your graph, so it's probably on par in that age group. Which means that my original point stands, if you're not scared of dying of the flu, you should not be scared of dying of covid-19. Unfortunately, humans have some crazy biases when it comes to evaluating risk. We're very bad at weighing the risk of rare events (<1% probability), we tend to overestimate them, and we're extremely bad at weighing new and previously not encountered risks, we severely overestimate them. The same bias also causes us to underestimate known risks, which is why some people are afraid of flying, but not of driving to the airport, even though risk analysis says it should be the other way around. And this is why people think covid-19 is super-duper scary, while no-one cares about the flu, even though for most of us we should value them about the same.