Ignoring the details, COVID's death rate in the US is about 1.17% (20K deaths, 1.7M infections), and let's say that on average 10% of infections require hospita

Ignoring the details, COVID's death rate in the US is about 1.17% (20K deaths, 1.7M infections), and let's say that on average 10% of infections require hospitalizations. You could still say that for the vast majority of people (~90%) it's like a bad cold, so your comment makes sense, but my thinking was focused on the risk/reward aspects. To simplify all of this, if covid didn't exist, and you somehow found out that by going out of the house you have a 1.17% chance of dying, but if you stay inside, that chance is 0.002% (average chance of dying on any given day in US), would you still go outside or would you stay inside? That 1.17% is a 585x increase over the usual 0.002%, and when I thought about how large that increase is, for me, it was very clearly not worth the risk.