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I think there are a number of factors at play. One, we've greatly reduced the risk of COVID through vaccines. This is the primary thrust of the article; if you

I think there are a number of factors at play. One, we've greatly reduced the risk of COVID through vaccines. This is the primary thrust of the article; if you've vaccinated, you're very unlikely to have serious consequences. Two, we're fatigued. You just can't be constantly vigilant for two or three years without something breaking. This compounds point one. We don't, as the article mentions, know what kind of relationship Omicron has to long COVID, but at this point, many are too tired to care. "I'm safe enough" is all we have the capacity for. Third, a large portion of the population is in denial about their own levels of risk. If there was a 1% chance of dying every time you drove a car, or even a 1% chance of dying every time you got into a car accident, there would be panic in the streets, no pun intended. But a lot of people round a 1% chance of dying from COVID down to zero.

JPKab 5y ago
You are forgetting that there really is not a 1% chance of dying of covid across all risk categories. The numbers are very clear on this: There are people who have a 1% or greater risk of dying if they catch it. Most people do not fall into that category, not even close. Let's start with the fact that the 1% IFR is calculated using a faulty denominator. Due to the high prevalence of asymptomatic infection, the denominator is far smaller than it should be. I was the only one in my household to have a single symptom when I caught it in February. My wife and two children did not have any symptoms and would not have been tested if I had not gotten myself tested. Wow this is an anecdote, it is directionally aligned with seroprevalence surveys. Omicron is even less symptomatic and therefore, we still have a denominator that is far too small. To put it into perspective, school children at the elementary age are actually at higher risk of death from an influenza infection than they are from a covid one. Obviously this does not apply to children who are immunocompromised or have comorbidities. They are the only age group that has a higher death rate from the influenza than from covid. But it is still notable. We have been sending our kids to schools without masks for decades even in the midst of various influenza epidemics. Over time populations in the US that are less sensitive to media reporting, especially working class people, have formed their own intuitive risk calculations based on their anecdotal experience. Your average taxi driver has a pretty good understanding of who is at high risk and who isn't. I experienced this in Vegas when a woman driving my taxi stated to me that the people she knew who had died were all old or "really really fat". Her words not mine lol. The people who are under 50 years of age who round 1% down to zero are more accurate than you are in their assessment. I hope I don't sound rude when I state that but based on the numbers it is accurate.
rdw 5y ago
Minor correction: it's actually nearly a 2% chance of dying (1.7%), after Delta became the dominant variant. Folks never really upgraded their talking points but subjectively 2% feels _much_ higher than 1%.
- Chilko 5y ago
  Indeed, particularly when you frame it as 1 in 100 vs 1 in 50
- JPKab 5y ago
  Source? You are claiming that the IFR for COVID doubled between alpha and delta. You also didn't expand upon the numbers. Is the 2% death rate for fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, unvaccinated? The three groups aren't remotely at the same risk. So which group has a 2% IFR from delta? Which nation released these stats? Where are they? And what about the asymptomatic cases which go undetected and are therefore not present in the denominator? Seroprevalence surveys have always indicated a gross underreporting of cases due to asymptomatics not pursuing tests. I don't intend to be rude, but what you are stating is a huge deal, and should have been earth-shattering news in the media. A doubling of fatality for a pandemic is not something that fails to make it into talking points when governments across the world are struggling to convince people to get vaccinated. Additionally, I live in the US state of Colorado. A few days ago, a post on HN's front page showed that Colorado's cases are now 100% omicron. That's not being addressed in your statement. Eventually, omicron will crowd out delta in other places as well.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> Third, a large portion of the population is in denial about their own levels of risk. If there was a 1% chance of dying every time you drove a car, or even a 1% chance of dying every time you got into a car accident, there would be panic in the streets, no pun intended. But a lot of people round a 1% chance of dying from COVID down to zero. I don't think you and I differ much in our broad conclusions on covid, but I don't think it makes sense to compare "chance of dying every time you drove a car" with "chance of dying if you catch covid"--basically this is a type error, you're comparing apples and oranges. The proper comparison operand for "every time you drove a car" would be "every time you interact with one or more people in person". Of course, you don't have a 1% chance of dying by covid every time you interact with one or more people in person because each interaction has a relatively low chance of contagion. Moreover, if there's a 1% chance that the average person would die from covid, that doesn't imply that a healthy person (i.e., no co-morbidities) has a 1% chance of dying from covid, so it's perfectly possible that the cohort who are risking covid exposure also have a lower risk of dying from covid than the average person (of course, I'm just responding to your framing of self-preservation--there's a good moral argument that healthy people should also be concerned about their contribution to spreading the virus irrespective of their own risk).
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  This is an excellent distinction because it denies all-encompassing judgement in the instance where one individual sees another who isn't taking as much precaution ("oh typical anti-masker"; judging others for interacting when you have been self-isolating - but probably not as well as you think).
- JPKab 5y ago
  Agreed. An obvious example of this is that the CDC numbers on COVID deaths by age. It's blatantly obvious, yet people on here wave their hand and say "1%" as if most HN readers are remotely close to 1% death rate, when it's a community composed of software engineers, a profession that skews young as a whole. Here's the stats. Bear in mind that the distribution of CASES skews young. https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true Roughly 20,000 people between 18 and 40 died of covid. About 35,000 between 40 and 50. 426k of the deaths were age 75 and up. 188k were people between 65 - 74.
JSavageOne 5y ago
Even if you're not vaccinated, you're extremely unlikely to have serious consequences unless you're elderly and/or have comorbidities. The infection fatality rate of COVID19 (which can only be estimated) is something like 0.20%. "Long COVID" is extremely rare and severely overstated.
- jat850 5y ago
  Show your math on 0.2%. This does not appear to hold true for any country I can think of off the top of my head. US and Canada are somewhere around 1.3-1.5% last I checked.
  - JSavageOne 5y ago
    You're referring to Case Fatality Rates. Case Fatality Rate = confirmed deaths / confirmed cases Infection Fatality Rate = total deaths / total infections Total infections can only be estimated, and is much higher than confirmed cases because most people who get COVID-19 don't get tested for it (either because they're asymptomatic, unable to get tested, or don't see see a point since they already know they're sick). Thus the infection fatality rate is substantially less than the case fatality rate. This paper estimates the median infection fatality rate to be 0.23% https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/ Also worth noting that deaths could be overestimated since anyone who dies having tested COVID positive is counted as a COVID death, and pretty much all patients who enter a hospital these days are tested for COVID.

JPKab 5y ago

You are forgetting that there really is not a 1% chance of dying of covid across all risk categories. The numbers are very clear on this: There are people who have a 1% or greater risk of dying if they catch it. Most people do not fall into that category, not even close. Let's start with the fact that the 1% IFR is calculated using a faulty denominator. Due to the high prevalence of asymptomatic infection, the denominator is far smaller than it should be. I was the only one in my household to have a single symptom when I caught it in February. My wife and two children did not have any symptoms and would not have been tested if I had not gotten myself tested. Wow this is an anecdote, it is directionally aligned with seroprevalence surveys. Omicron is even less symptomatic and therefore, we still have a denominator that is far too small. To put it into perspective, school children at the elementary age are actually at higher risk of death from an influenza infection than they are from a covid one. Obviously this does not apply to children who are immunocompromised or have comorbidities. They are the only age group that has a higher death rate from the influenza than from covid. But it is still notable. We have been sending our kids to schools without masks for decades even in the midst of various influenza epidemics. Over time populations in the US that are less sensitive to media reporting, especially working class people, have formed their own intuitive risk calculations based on their anecdotal experience. Your average taxi driver has a pretty good understanding of who is at high risk and who isn't. I experienced this in Vegas when a woman driving my taxi stated to me that the people she knew who had died were all old or "really really fat". Her words not mine lol. The people who are under 50 years of age who round 1% down to zero are more accurate than you are in their assessment. I hope I don't sound rude when I state that but based on the numbers it is accurate.

rdw 5y ago

Minor correction: it's actually nearly a 2% chance of dying (1.7%), after Delta became the dominant variant. Folks never really upgraded their talking points but subjectively 2% feels _much_ higher than 1%.

Chilko 5y ago
Indeed, particularly when you frame it as 1 in 100 vs 1 in 50
JPKab 5y ago
Source? You are claiming that the IFR for COVID doubled between alpha and delta. You also didn't expand upon the numbers. Is the 2% death rate for fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, unvaccinated? The three groups aren't remotely at the same risk. So which group has a 2% IFR from delta? Which nation released these stats? Where are they? And what about the asymptomatic cases which go undetected and are therefore not present in the denominator? Seroprevalence surveys have always indicated a gross underreporting of cases due to asymptomatics not pursuing tests. I don't intend to be rude, but what you are stating is a huge deal, and should have been earth-shattering news in the media. A doubling of fatality for a pandemic is not something that fails to make it into talking points when governments across the world are struggling to convince people to get vaccinated. Additionally, I live in the US state of Colorado. A few days ago, a post on HN's front page showed that Colorado's cases are now 100% omicron. That's not being addressed in your statement. Eventually, omicron will crowd out delta in other places as well.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> Third, a large portion of the population is in denial about their own levels of risk. If there was a 1% chance of dying every time you drove a car, or even a 1% chance of dying every time you got into a car accident, there would be panic in the streets, no pun intended. But a lot of people round a 1% chance of dying from COVID down to zero. I don't think you and I differ much in our broad conclusions on covid, but I don't think it makes sense to compare "chance of dying every time you drove a car" with "chance of dying if you catch covid"--basically this is a type error, you're comparing apples and oranges. The proper comparison operand for "every time you drove a car" would be "every time you interact with one or more people in person". Of course, you don't have a 1% chance of dying by covid every time you interact with one or more people in person because each interaction has a relatively low chance of contagion. Moreover, if there's a 1% chance that the average person would die from covid, that doesn't imply that a healthy person (i.e., no co-morbidities) has a 1% chance of dying from covid, so it's perfectly possible that the cohort who are risking covid exposure also have a lower risk of dying from covid than the average person (of course, I'm just responding to your framing of self-preservation--there's a good moral argument that healthy people should also be concerned about their contribution to spreading the virus irrespective of their own risk).

DiggyJohnson 5y ago
This is an excellent distinction because it denies all-encompassing judgement in the instance where one individual sees another who isn't taking as much precaution ("oh typical anti-masker"; judging others for interacting when you have been self-isolating - but probably not as well as you think).
JPKab 5y ago
Agreed. An obvious example of this is that the CDC numbers on COVID deaths by age. It's blatantly obvious, yet people on here wave their hand and say "1%" as if most HN readers are remotely close to 1% death rate, when it's a community composed of software engineers, a profession that skews young as a whole. Here's the stats. Bear in mind that the distribution of CASES skews young. https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true Roughly 20,000 people between 18 and 40 died of covid. About 35,000 between 40 and 50. 426k of the deaths were age 75 and up. 188k were people between 65 - 74.

JSavageOne 5y ago

Even if you're not vaccinated, you're extremely unlikely to have serious consequences unless you're elderly and/or have comorbidities. The infection fatality rate of COVID19 (which can only be estimated) is something like 0.20%. "Long COVID" is extremely rare and severely overstated.

jat850 5y ago
Show your math on 0.2%. This does not appear to hold true for any country I can think of off the top of my head. US and Canada are somewhere around 1.3-1.5% last I checked.
- JSavageOne 5y ago
  You're referring to Case Fatality Rates. Case Fatality Rate = confirmed deaths / confirmed cases Infection Fatality Rate = total deaths / total infections Total infections can only be estimated, and is much higher than confirmed cases because most people who get COVID-19 don't get tested for it (either because they're asymptomatic, unable to get tested, or don't see see a point since they already know they're sick). Thus the infection fatality rate is substantially less than the case fatality rate. This paper estimates the median infection fatality rate to be 0.23% https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/ Also worth noting that deaths could be overestimated since anyone who dies having tested COVID positive is counted as a COVID death, and pretty much all patients who enter a hospital these days are tested for COVID.