9 ms·

Here’s an interesting calculator from Oxford using Britain’s data from COVID: https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation My wife is

• nkozyra 5y ago
  As a nurse, what's her risk of spreading it to someone with a much, much greater risk of death?
  • rogerkirkness 5y ago
    If we're going to run society this way, we're going to need much more difficult driving tests.
    • nkozyra 5y ago
      Unless bad driving is an infectious airborne pathogen, I'm not following this analogy.
      • dgfitz 5y ago
        Sure seems to be in the mid Atlantic region of the US. Also, I’m sure you get the point they were making, why be unreasonable about it?
        • Igelau 5y ago
          Is there a better name for the "playing dumb" style of argument?
      • Smaug123 5y ago
        Come on - obviously bad driving is not primarily an infectious airborne pathogen. Bad driving is something you can unilaterally inflict on other people to permanently ruin their lives, as is an infectious airborne pathogen.
        • nkozyra 5y ago
          Well I certainly do think people should consider others when they get behind the wheel. Similarly I think people should consider the risk to others if they get this pathogen rather than just the risk to themselves.
          • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
            The problem is, 73% of drivers think they're above-average drivers[1]. So just as you can't know whether you're the one spreading COVID, you can't know if you're the bad driver. The solution is to get rid of cars as a primary mode of transport, and I really do think we should do that! 1: https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-are-overconfident-in-their-driving-skills-2018-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-are-overconfident-...
            • nkozyra 5y ago
              > So just as you can't know whether you're the one spreading COVID, you can't know if you're the bad the driver. This really isn't remotely analogous, particularly since you absolutely can know you're at risk of spreading COVID.
              • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
                You added the "at risk" part, not me! :) Your version applies to cars too! By driving a car, you are at risk of causing a car crash!
                • nkozyra 5y ago
                  You said "you can't know" With COVID, you can. Pretty easily.
                  • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
                    Sorry, I might not be understanding where you're going with this. I initially thought you meant "you can know you're at risk of spreading COVID, because everyone is at risk of spreading COVID." Certainly, anyone who receives a positive PCR test for COVID should quarantine ASAP. But if you're incubating COVID, but not infectious yet, the tests will return negative. A test only tells you whether you were infectious at the time of the test, so by the time you've seen the results, the information is already outdated.
      • TakuYam 5y ago
        Bad driving begets bad driving. Some jackass cuts you up dangerously, your adrenaline is pumping and you then follow too close behind a third driver repeat ad nauseam
    • Icathian 5y ago
      I understand the point you meant to make, but to be honest I've always found it horrifying whenever I have to sit in the DMV and see who all they allow to pilot steel missiles around. Our "licensing" for drivers in the US is abhorrent.
    • lovegoblin 5y ago
      > we're going to need much more difficult driving tests. Sounds good to me. Let's require regular re-testing while we're at it.
      • jasonladuke0311 5y ago
        While we are at it, mandatory breathalyzers in all cars, and all cell phones should be locked while traveling over 10 MPH. Let’s do this!
    • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      Your analogy doesn't really make sense to me. It's not like we are aware that there are certain drivers that are 100x more likely to kill certain members of the population. And if we were aware that certain ways of driving made you 100x more likely to kill someone, people would AT LEAST be talking about banning them. Like, if teenagers could drive around drunk just find and not kill themselves or other teenagers somehow - they probably wouldn't care if only old, sick people ended up dead from their driving. People would probably make rules or at least talk about making rules to prevent this. But that's not how driving really works.
    • herbstein 5y ago
      Sounds sensible to me. The US in general has super lax driving tests. Here in Denmark it's about 3 months of theoretical classes side-by-side with driving with a certified driving instructor. We also learn the basics of cars on a closed track, and later learn to drive in slippery conditions on the same closed tracks. The closed-track tests include being able to catch the car after pulling the handbrake in a turn while going 80 km/h (50 mph). Oh, and to actually get your license you also have to drive 45 minutes with a police official checking your every move.
      • ThalesX 5y ago
        My friend living in Denmark, with a driver’s license from a corrupt country where literally anyone can get it, would render your whole 3-months intensive system useless. He is in fact driving, and could cause quite a crash, with all this amazing procedure you describe. We are a somewhat globalized civilization and the same as this security theatre about keeping airports open with countries with 2% vaccination rate can be said about driving.
        • rasz 5y ago
          But Mum, Kevin does drugs and he is fine, why cant I?
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
      • pandaman 5y ago
        Why would you want to pull the handbrake in a turn while going 50 mph? And what is going to happen if you pull the handbrake at 50 mph other than the handbrake burning out? I have not had a car with a handbrake at all but I drove a few rentals with one and they drove normally even when I forgot to take them off the handbrake, the thing is just a lever with a wire, it cannot stop the car even on idle. Or do they use a rally car with a hydraulic handbrake that does something at that speed?
        • 5y ago
  • nvr219 5y ago
    The website doesn't have that info.
  • clairity 5y ago
    also tiny, since they have rigorous procedures and properly-deployed ppe for all sorts of transmissible infections, not just covid (and where masks can actually help, unlike most mask usage). the treatment risk calculation is also entirely different, since "someone with a much, much greater risk of death" is already flirting with death in other material ways.
    • citboin 5y ago
      You’re making uninformed assumptions and obviously don’t work at a Covid center in the USA. Personnel are now careless, many are fatigued and/or disillusioned, protocolsuu are not universal or enforced, many buy into the political drama and don’t mask when outside the facility and patients have become argumentative about masking. The moment I have another career option is the moment I quit. PPE use / enforcement and availability is also spotty. People are tired of arguing with their coworkers about it, too.
      • clairity 5y ago
        buddhism suggests we focus on the things we can control, like perception and attitude in the face of otherwise uncontrollable circumstances. i've no doubt the situation for many medical professionals is quite frustrating, even infuriating, but it would have been so in any of the myriad of realistic scenarios. the virus is, and was always going to be, endemic, which means hospitalization and death rates are pretty well bounded no matter what we realistically did. the frustration comes from believing that this isn't true, that there was something that could be done to significantly reduce these rates, but that's mediopolitical messaging, not realistic possibility. accepting this could possibly relieve some of your frustration. also, no assumption was involved, just the simple logic of multiplying two tiny numbers resulting in another tiny number.
  • dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
    What's a parents' risk of having children that eventually die? What's your risk of driving and having a seizure at the same time and wiping out kids on the sidewalk? What's your risk that while leaving Home Depot you dropped a few nails on the ground and someone's car tire picked them up and now they'll have a blowout on the highway? We can take this stupid premise to its logical end and never do anything out of fear that we might eventually harm someone else, but that's not how life has gone on for millennia. We have the vaccine which is the solution, by and large the data supports that the sustained overreaction is now disproportionate to the actual risks, time to let the science we supposedly all believe in aka natural selection run its course.
    • Grakel 5y ago
      No way, the 6th booster will definitely do it! Or maybe the 7th!
    • shkkmo 5y ago
      We can take a realistic look at the increased risks involved with particular behaviors and the relative gains. There are people who don't have kids of their own because of the high risk of passing potentially fatal genetic defects to their children. If you are an at risk epileptic, driving regularly is something you should avoid. If an you are contemplating an activity that has a significant risk of causing harm to others, you have a moral obligation to consider if the benefits are big enough to be worth that risk. If you have a higher than average level of contact with vulnerable populations, you should take higher than normal precautions to reduce your chances of infection. This is just basic moral common sense.
  • fredophile 5y ago
    I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Should we stop having nurses treat covid patients so they don't spread it to people who are more likely to have severe reactions? Should we stop having nurses treat people with compromised immune systems and other health issues so they can treat covid patients?
• robocat 5y ago
  Absolutely useless: the calculator doesn't even ask if you have been vaccinated! And the risks are calculated for someone in the UK - completely irrelevant if you are not (no NHS etcetera). Was the calculator developed before Delta? Does it already include a factor for your chances of catching it, or is it the risk after you have caught Covid? So many glaring issues - it isn't designed to be informative to the general public.
  • azornathogron 5y ago
    The associated paper was published in October 2020, so yes this was developed well before delta (at least well before delta's arrival in the UK), most likely in the period between the first and second major peaks in the UK. Given the way academia works I doubt it has been updated significantly since then.
• learc83 5y ago
  The “risk” is misleading because it’s the risk that you will catch it within a 90 day period based on the community spread in the UK at some point in the past (before Delta) times the risk that you will die if you catch it. Since your wife is a nurse, she’s much more likely to be exposed than the average UK resident. I also think even in her case you likely added an extra zero or 2 based on what I’m seeing while playing around with it. I think what most people want is what’s my risk of death assuming I get it, not that multiplied times the risk of being infected within only the next 90 days.
  • nickthemagicman 5y ago
    Those are two different measurements. You have: 1. Chance of getting a disease 2. Chance of dying from said disease once acquired Both have numerous factors that affect the result.
    • noasaservice 5y ago
      For someone who works in health care, they're likely subjected to multiple variants at one time. What's the metrics look like when someone is hit with 2+ variants at once? HIV is similar, where someone can be positive for 1 or more different strains. And their viral loads are cumulative.
      • nradov 5y ago
        At this point the Delta variant has effectively out completed everything. The chance of exposure to any other variant is low.
  • swiley 5y ago
    >an absolute failure to understand Bayes theorem.
    • learc83 5y ago
      >a totally asinine comment Why not multiply by the probability that you don't die within the next 90 days from some other event, or the probability that the earth doesn't explode within 90 days. The likelihood that you're infected is both too hard to calculate for a given individual to be useful and, based on current epidemiological models, close enough to 1 over the long term for unvaccinated people that it doesn't make much difference. The probability used in the model presented is the probability that a random person in the UK will be infected given the same conditions seen in March of 2020 over a 90 day period. It's a useless number. Multiplying the IFR just destroys whatever useful information you could extract from the IFR in the first place.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  NPR article honestly just sounds like fear-mongering. I am fine with showing how worse it can get, but nothing in the NPR article talks about the likelyhood of getting a bad case of COVID after vaccination. Objectively informing the public, it is not.
  • dimator 5y ago
    The section "How high are my chances of getting a breakthrough case these days?" goes into that. If you're looking for a hard number, I don't think anyone can give you that because it's highly community specific. I have no idea how you got fear-mongering from that article, though. My impress was that it's a reality check on what the vaccine is capable of and what one individual's breakthrough looks like.
    • dehrmann 5y ago
      > I have no idea how you got fear-mongering from that article This is a single first-hand account, was subject to publication bias, and a relatively bad breakthrough case.
    • systemvoltage 5y ago
      > how you got fear-mongering from that article Title of the article: "I got 'Mild' Breakthrough Case". By definition, it is not a mild case. Any reasonable definition of mildness would not include the terms "My eyeballs ache" and "103 degree fever". The article implies that even the mild case of COVID has horrifying symptomps which it goes into great detail to painfully exemplify. This is misleading. Absolutely despicable journalism, if you ask me.
      • mrgreenfur 5y ago
        It didn't imply, it defined the term 'mild' as hospitalization or use of oxygen. What are you mad about? The point was to give an anecdote to keep people aware of what a breakthrough is like.
  • clairity 5y ago
• tfehring 5y ago
  I’m personally way more worried about long-term cognitive symptoms than about dying. Obviously the jury’s still out on long term symptoms, but something like a quarter of people with symptomatic COVID seem to have some kind of cognitive symptom (mainly “brain fog” and/or short-term memory loss) 8 months later. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.18.21253633v2.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.18.21253633v...
  • xupybd 5y ago
    It's also unclear if those long COVID symptoms will resolve after a few years.
    • jxf 5y ago
      Even a few weeks of "brain fog" would be pretty devastating to my mental health, ability to earn a living, and ability to be an effective parent.
      • fellowniusmonk 5y ago
        I was double vaxxed with moderna and caught a breakthrough case. The weird thing is that while the extent of my infection was that I had a bad sinus infection without fever for about 3 days. It greatly effected my cognition, besides temporarily (<1 day) losing my sense of smell I also experienced a loss of spatial/body awareness and was knocking things over which I never do even when sick, I was easily cognitively overwhelmed for about 10-15 days after my positive test, 11 days after my symptoms subsided. I am a software engineer that a couple times of year may get halo migraines, the worst untreated migraines I've had caused a small decrease in cognition and working memory for almost a week, most migraines have little to no cognitiove effect. This "mild" covid was by far the most systemic and far reaching cognitive impairment I've had, worse even then post surgery recovery involving deep general anesthesia. It effected working memory, ability to follow conversational threads & profoundly limited my available vocabulary, I was missing words, not simply fumbling for them, for several weeks. It's an interesting virus to be sure, my generally unflappable fiancee was uncharacteristically worried by my erratic mental state, she was relieved I tested positive with covid as she had been worrying about a stroke or something. Anecdotally... I would not recommend getting this virus if you are a knowledge worker.
• deleted 5y ago
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• gilbetron 5y ago
  As others have pointed out, that site generates a risk that isn't what most people think of as the risk of death, that is it gives the risk of catching and then dying of Covid during a 90 day period when Delta wasn't around. For a more expected assessment of "risk of dying if I have covid", you can use this: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mortality-risk-estimator https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort... Although it only shows "<0.1%" for anyone under 40s, so it doesn't break things down that fine (better for hospitalizations).