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[sebastian_dangerfield]

At the age of 40, here is your chance of getting cancer:

2.72 (w/in 10 yrs)
8.98 (20 yrs)
20.14 (30 yrs)
41.55 (Ever)

21.57 (Dying of it, over lifetime)

The chance of dying of Covid in one's 40s is hard to pin down, but the ranges I've seen run from 1% to 5%. So I'll use a crude average: 3%.

It's roughly the same chance a 40 year old you'll come down with cancer over the next ten years. It's far lower than the chance you'll come down with cancer over the next 20 years.

Now factor in the chance of all the other diseases one might acquire, the accidents in which one might die, and unsurprisingly, you've got a statistically larger and larger chance of death accruing as you age. If you sat down and sketched it out, you'd scare yourself silly. (There's a hedge fund billionaire in Geneva named Alan Howard who stopped skiing and had his image removed from Google after becoming obsessed with risk. And of course there's Howard Hughes at the extreme end of black swan paranoia.)

I think what makes Covid such a fascinating psychological experiment is it shows the extremes to which people will go to try to entirely control their surroundings.

That's really what this is. Covid has a very slim chance of killing you. It's far more likely you'll die in a car accident, or of cancer, or in the US, heart disease. (Somewhere, a man rides a motorcycle wearing a covid mask.) The small delta between being absolutely certain of avoiding death from Covid and being 97% sure of avoiding death from it is causing people extreme uneasiness. I think they want to go out, they know the math, they know the unlikeliness of death accruing from this, and yet, it's really hard to concede that 3%.

Even though their risk of dying from various other causes far exceeds 3% any day of the week.

They say the mind processes loss a lot more strongly than gain. It appears it also favors absolute certainty in an extreme disproportionate ratio to near certainty.

(I do not think it's mere fear of getting sick that has caused people to be so upset by this thing. If you could guarantee people that they'd get sick but not die, I think almost everyone would choose to get the virus and be done with it.)