sheldrake wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 9:36 am
bob sterman wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 9:05 am
And when SARS-CoV-2 is circulating widely in the community then an individual's risk of death actually (and significantly) changes. I'm not making the comparisons that you like and that confirm your views. That's different from not making the "right kind" of comparisons.
You're still missing the point. I'm comparing the risk
from SARS-CoV-2 to other risks we live with.
Lets say your risk of death from Cancer is 35% and your risk of death from Covid is 0.25-0.75% (you can call it 1% if you really insist, it won't matter for this question). If you could cut your risk of cancer death in half, or your risk of Covid death in half, but not both, which would you take ?
I've been trying to work out whether you're comparing apples with apples here but can't actually find any statistics for the percentage of people diagnosed with cancer who then go on to die of it. Could you share your source for the 35% please? But if that number is correct, then you're still not making the right comparison.
What you should be comparing is a person's chance of dying of cancer vs Covid either over a lifetime or over a specific time period. As we can't possibly have any lifetime risk of death from Covid stats at this point, the best we can do is to look at deaths from each cause during 2020. That still doesn't give a true picture for 2 reasons - firstly we hardly had any cases of Covid in the first couple of months of the year and secondly these are the figures that happened after significant mitigating measures were taken to reduce Covid deaths - we don't know how much higher the number would have been without that, but it would definitely have been a lot.
Numbers obviously vary a lot by age but at a total population level, for 2020, 0.25% of people died of cancer while 0.116% of people died with Covid 19 identified and a further 0.006% died with Covid not identified (presumably died of Covid like disease but without having had a test)
So, with all the mitigation measures in place, with less than a full year of Covid infections, close to half the number of people died of Covid in 2020 as died of cancer. If lockdowns and other measures had not happened, we don't know what the Covid number would have looked like, but I don't think anyone would argue that it wouldn't have been higher.
So your 35% vs 0.25-0.75% comparison is clearly meaningless. Of course, if there was something that was that many times more likely to kill us in any given year (or lifetime) than Covid, then I'm pretty sure we would all be paying a lot more attention to it. But there isn't.