9 ms·

I never understand this whole "99% survival rate" being presented as if that's low. I don't know about you, but if I'm around something that has a 1 in 100 chan

• disneygibson 5y ago
  Like I said, your ancestors had 99% more courage and confidence in the face of danger you can’t even begin to imagine. But, we are a terrified people and so we continue to build a safety space cocoon around ourselves.
  • ramphastidae 5y ago
    And those ancestors would switch places with us in a heartbeat. You are romanticizing.
    • disneygibson 5y ago
      No, they wouldn’t, considering that they explicitly set up difficult lives for themselves according to their values. And no, you can’t read the minds of long dead people either. Is it really so difficult to consider that we live in a scared, lazy age?
      • chickenpotpie 5y ago
        The idea that people made their lives intentionally harder in the past is absolutely ludicrous. Almost every person in history would swap places with me right now in a heartbeat.
        • disneygibson 5y ago
          It may seem hard to believe, but not every civilization throughout history has put consumerism and comfort above all other values.
          • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
            Do you have a citation of a society that is stronger because it made its citizens suffer a decreased quality of life?
            • disneygibson 5y ago
              The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a good place to start. Spengler in his works has a cyclical view of civilizations, which you might also enjoy. Many “cyclical” ideologies also have similar ideas going back millennia. Hinduism for example sees the world as occurring in cycles. According to some, we are in a materialistic age, which is a consequence of losing spiritual values and a focus on comfort and pleasure.
              • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
                The Roman Empire fell so I don’t know if it’s a great argument that intentionally lowering the life quality of your citizens is a good idea.
                • disneygibson 5y ago
                  You are misunderstanding me. These books argue that Rome partially fell because it became too focused on luxury and pleasure.
            • scohesc 5y ago
              China
      • matrixagent 5y ago
        > And no, you can’t read the minds of long dead people either. And yet that is exactly what you are doing throughout multiple comments.
        • disneygibson 5y ago
          No, I’m saying that when faced with the choice between comfort and difficulty, many people in the past chose difficulty. To insist that they would trade their religious beliefs, for example, for internet and Uber eats is rather myopic.
      • MandieD 5y ago
        Pretty sure my great^9 grandmother who never saw her parents again after leaving an impoverished village in Alsace for Louisiana, married some widower she’d never met, died of one of the epidemics that swept through coastal Louisiana on the regular in the 18th century, or her daughter (my great^8 grandmother) who was married a few months later at age 14 to an older man, pumped out at least 7 children, then died of another epidemic at 24 wouldn’t have minded my life of relative wealth, ease and personal freedom (college! Moving abroad but flying home each year! Marrying around 30! Having a kid only after I really, really wanted to! Vaccination against a new epidemic a mere 18 months after it started!)
      • kbos87 5y ago
        This is where your total loss of credibility happened, just so you know.
  • gilbetron 5y ago
    The ancestors would have taken the vaccine in a heartbeat (as they did with polio). The ancestors worked really hard and faced all that danger to make the world a better, safer place so they didn't have to watch loved ones die. People that don't take the vaccine are spitting in their faces.
• a_conservative 5y ago
  And what about unknown long-haul effects from newly developed vaccines? Are we permitted to be concerned about those?
  • slenk 5y ago
    At this point, long term side effects would be known about: "History tells us that severe side effects are extremely rare, and if they do occur, they usually happen within the first two months" https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19-vaccine-wont-have-long-term-side-effects https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...
    • disneygibson 5y ago
      So we can know the long term effects of a novel vaccine but we can’t know the long term effects of COVID? How does that make any sense? Don’t you think it’s more reasonable to assume we don’t know either?
      • slenk 5y ago
        Maybe? We have been studying vaccines and how they work since the 1800s...we have a lot more history with vaccines and how they work compared to a Coronavirus. And two of the available vaccines don't even give you a dead infection like most vaccines - you can't get COVID from the COVID shot (Moderna or Pfizer)
        • disneygibson 5y ago
          If it’s a new vaccine unlike most others, doesn’t that imply that historical information is not as relevant as it would be otherwise?
          • slenk 5y ago
            What about some of the people that have been vaccinated almost a year and a half with no side effects? Does that evidence count?
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > I'm going to do everything I can to not let it And until yesterday, that was entirely your choice! Unfortunately, as of today, it isn't any more.
  • xyzzy21 5y ago
    It's still a choice! If they fire you, that's a better option if you don't believe the vaccines are safe (they have NOT been fully tested - you are a guinea pig in the safety trials if you got the jab), the vaccines have NOT been approved (the lie of the claim otherwise is that no currently available vaccine has been approved - they are all still in EUA - they are still experimental while the "approved" Pfizer vaccine has never been made yet, has never been tested either and is NOT available to anyone because it's never been made yet).
    • commandlinefan 5y ago
      That's true - "obey or starve" is strictly still a choice.
      • burntwater 5y ago
        It's not a question of "obey or starve," it's a question of "live in and participate in society, or GFTO." If you want to enjoy all the benefits of living in a well governed, well protected society, you're going to have to give up certain things. If you're not willing to give up certain things that are required to maintain that society, you're welcome to go away. You have that choice.
• clairity 5y ago
  > “…but if I'm around something that has a 1 in 100 chance of killing me, I'm going to do everything I can to not let it, because those are NOT low odds.” then you should avoid any and all cars as you have a 1 in 100 lifetime chance of dying in a car accident. or birth, as babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth. covid suffers severely from availability and recency bias because our lives are so exceedingly safe already. it’s hard to die on accident, even via covid.
  • tolmasky 5y ago
    I actually do try to stay away from cars. I think we are absolutely horrible at addressing risk accurately, and someday when we have some sort of carless society (or maybe self-driving cars?) we will not understand how we could possibly have accepted the mortality rates associated with cars. Not to mention the less immediate effects on long term health from exhaust, etc. Although I feel you were trying to make the opposite case, I think events like COVID should illuminate the dangers and inadequacies of other elements of our lives. If you've read "The Maniac of New York" comic, it makes a similar point: a murderer that can't be stopped eventually just becomes accepted by society. Perhaps we have recency bias with COVID, but we have a more worrying complacency bias with other elements of our lives, like cars. Dramatic life extensions and quality of life improvements come when people stop accepting that "meh, people get sick and die," and instead get curious and start pushing for "burdensome" things like public sanitation. Perhaps more importantly though, the ICU is getting filled up and causing other unrelated ailments to become worse. This isn't the case with most the other things you listed. > babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth This one is hard to avoid unfortunately, unless you believe in Pixar's "pre life" world from "Soul". Also, arguably avoiding it leads to 100% mortality depending on how you count "not living". Neither here nor there, but I wasn't really a fan of that movie.
    • clairity 5y ago
      rather than being so dichotomous and partisan, my actual position is that we focus on the wrong problems because of biases and fallacious thinking, both individual and systemic. death by car is a real problem, but we’ve long accepted that and similar risks to our lives (as an aside, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases are more pressing, to which auto pollution does contribute). covid is comparable to that level of risk and yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths. we need to couch novel threats in relation to existing risk tolerances developed over millennia rather than the other way around (because those exist already for good reasons, à la chesterson’s fence). the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  The odds of infection are equally low. MULTIPLE both to get the actual odds of dying from it. Plus then COMPARE that to other probabilities of death such as car accidents, medical mistakes, etc. which are FAR HIGHER.
  • piva00 5y ago
    I knew more people that died from COVID in 2020 than in car crashes combined all of my life.
• vikingerik 5y ago
  I'll take a stab at that survival number, which is inaccurate information. Your risk is way less than 1 in 100. First off, the baseline survival rate is much better than 99%, between 99.8% and 99.9%. That's already an order of magnitude lower, closer to 1/1000 than 1/100. 1% lethality was a bad estimate from early on, before we realized we were undercounting mild cases by a huge multiple. Second, lethality is highly correlated to comorbidities, including obesity and vitamin D deficiency. 94% of Covid deaths had another condition. If you don't, then your own risk reduces by another factor of 15. Third, lethality is highly stratified by age. Under age 50 incurs at least 10x fewer deaths than higher age brackets. Fourth, the vaccines. That also reduces risk by a factor somewhere in the ballpark of 10x again. Fifth, Delta variant is also less lethal, as seen by the low death rates in India and the UK, although we don't seem to have reliable numbers on that yet. So if you are young, healthy, not overweight, and vaccinated, multiply all that out and your risk factor really comes to less than one in a million. You take bigger risks every time you drive in your car. You're losing more life-value worrying about Covid than you actually stand to lose from it. That all said, there is the point to be worried about Covid not for yourself, but for the possibility of spreading it. That's a valid point, but that is a question of politics, of individualism versus collectivism, not of science and statistics.