I’d probably be careful using this as a public health communication tool; you’re comparing these risks to things like flying, which people are viscerally afraid of. Not to mention that the CVST issue is a poorly understood and evolving picture, so it’s hard to confidently assert that the risk is actually a micromort.

The perceptive gap between zero risk and extremely small risk is enormous. If I’m young and healthy, I can easily avoid the additional 1 micromort risk of taking the vaccine by simply not taking it. Now what?

I'm not sure where you're getting your stats, but so far I've gotten

> That's about 10 times less risky than walking down the stairs

and

> That’s the same risk as driving for 5 hours

Which implies that walking down some stairs is equivalently risky to driving for 50 hours. That seems... unlikely.

There are about 150 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles in the US [1]. That means that a micromort (a 1 in a million chance of death) corresponds to about 66 miles driven, which would probably be about 2 hours of driving.

In 2000, 1,307 people died from falling down stairs[2]. The US population in 2000 was about 280 million, so 1307 / 280e6 / 365 = 1.27e-8, so the average person had about a 12.7 in 1 billion chance of dying by falling down stairs on a given day. It seems reasonable to estimate that on average, each American goes down stairs about once per day (some people never go down stairs, others go down them multiple times per day). As such, I think the estimate for "risk of going down the stairs" should be more like 10 in a billion and less like 10 in a million.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

[2] https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm -- "Fall on and from stairs and steps"

This is brilliant, I manage IT systems for hospitals and clinics and hear the front desk staff using analogies like this to put the risk into perspective. For something like this it shouldn't matter if you're even an order of magnitude off, the point is to help the non-mathematically-inclined general population understand how low the risks are in a context they understand (and anecdotally I'd say this strategy works well).

> If you're not willing to take 1 in a million chances, it's gonna be pretty hard for you to get out of bed today

People's brains don't work that way. It requires a lot of education on probability, and even then the math often conflicts with our instincts.

Yes, and probably staying in bed will have its own risk of blood clots and depression leading to suicide.

This is true, but I find it funny and frustrating that people are so ready to selectively treat rare odds as catastrophic in other circumstances that suit their worldview. For example, urbanists are ready to accept the premise of Vision Zero, which aims to push road fatalities down to zero. Today, there is approximately 1 traffic fatality per 100 million miles traveled in the US. It's so rare that it doesn't deserve attention, but here we are, with people looking to force cars to drive slowly (or ban them outright) to try and chase a world with perfect risk-free conditions. I am betting the same cohort that supports Vision Zero overlaps significantly with the group that thinks none of these vaccines should be paused. I'm sure there are similar examples of logical inconsistency that we can highlight for any political/social cohort as well - that's just one example. But my point is people tend to selectively make data driven arguments only when it suits them.

The only relevant question is is my chances better with covid than with the vacine?

Of course the real answer is to get more phizer and then stop using second rate shit.

Application Error

The one thing you miss, what is the risk of dying of COVID, as a healthy person under 30?

Love this work!