Obviously the main factor in this particular instance is that infectiousness for viruses like this can lead to exponential spread. But there are many other possibilities that could also justify great caution, despite the above stats--e.g., the ease of avoiding certain risks.
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I’ve thought a bit about this specific thing! But like, in my head the next bit was ‘ok, essential workers can’t pretend they have COVID, but maybe if everyone who could get away with it acted as if they were infectious for a month then we’d have this thing under control’?
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I mean, who knows, obviously. I’d still love to snap my fingers and make that happen though
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People also forget that encounters add up quickly. If you say, "I'm ok with encounters that only have a 0.3% chance of infection" you could easily end up having 100 such encounters, of various kinds, in a year, giving you a 30% chance of infection.
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I think the 0.3% in people's heads here is the chance of dying if they get infected, not the chance of getting infected from any one encounter. (I'm not endorsing the numbers. I've just seen 99.7% circulating as the purported chance of survival )
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0.3% is over 1,000,000 fatalities in the US. With some survivors having serious ongoing health issues. The ethical obligation to take steps that minimise your chances of infecting others is clear. Worldwide fatalities would be 234,000,000.
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HIV meant certain death for decades IF you contracted it. Clearly COVID is more infectious as bodily fluid contact was/is the only way to tract HIV. However, the survival rate of COVID is much higher than HIV even as more people survive the virus that ravaged the 80’s and 90’s...
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A number is a person
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There’s decent research that people internalize almost all probabilities as being 0%, 50-50, or 100%. So .03% might as well be zero.
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It’s also interesting how the opposite never clicks for some people. ‘Oh, well, if I wear a mask it reduces my chance of getting infected by x%, & it reduces the chance I spread it by y%; those odds are significant enough for so little cost, I should wear a mask!’
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