3 ms·

I'm curious what people think of these calculators. I wonder if people are surprised by the numbers, given that news headlines don't quantify the risk in detail

I'm curious what people think of these calculators. I wonder if people are surprised by the numbers, given that news headlines don't quantify the risk in detail. Also people may think differently about the same numbers. I made my own covid mortality calculations last April, and was not scared off by my estimated odds, 1 in 350 per year. Using the linked UK calculator my odds were far better than I had estimated, about 1 in 16,000 per 90 days. The activity calculator was interesting, also. I had heard that mask-to-mask interactions were based on an hour of nearness while indoors. I thought it to be an overreaction when people would wear masks outside and cross the street to avoid passing on the sidewalk. So I looked up 10 people with no masks in a room, and it was a 1 in 200 chance per hour of catching covid given the odds of someone from my area being there who had it. Once again the risk was not as high I as thought it would be. I'm curious what others think of the numbers from these calculators, especially those who find them alarming or surprising.

dent9876543 6y ago
They don’t differentiate risk and impact. The Oxford calculator seems to be personally focused, and for me, that’s I what. Reading was relatively low risk. Seems to correlate with what I’ve read. But the microcovid calc rated something I was previously accustomed to doing regularly as “high”. For me that wasn’t intuitively accurate. I guess for an immediate community of vulnerable or averse people, then high would be right. But not me personally. Quite difficult to disentangle the personal from community risk. Likely to lead to risk averse behaviour. And that is fine, but only if the mitigation is accurately taken into account. It seems unlikely that would have been done.

3 ms·

I'm curious what people think of these calculators. I wonder if people are surprised by the numbers, given that news headlines don't quantify the risk in detail

by mikem170 6y ago

dent9876543 6y ago
They don’t differentiate risk and impact. The Oxford calculator seems to be personally focused, and for me, that’s I what. Reading was relatively low risk. Seems to correlate with what I’ve read. But the microcovid calc rated something I was previously accustomed to doing regularly as “high”. For me that wasn’t intuitively accurate. I guess for an immediate community of vulnerable or averse people, then high would be right. But not me personally. Quite difficult to disentangle the personal from community risk. Likely to lead to risk averse behaviour. And that is fine, but only if the mitigation is accurately taken into account. It seems unlikely that would have been done.