> 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

> 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).