COVID risk. COVID vaccine risk.
COVID is far more dangerous than the COVID vaccine.
A Guest Post report.
Everything has risks, and we quantify them. A "micromort" is a one-in-a-million chance of dying from some activity. The average American has a baseline risk of about one micromort per day of dying from some accidental cause.
Comparisons with other risks put things into perspective.
Skydiving is seven micromorts, each jump. Going under general anesthesia is five micromorts, each time. Giving childbirth in the USA is 210 micromorts. Back in March-May, 2020, at the height of COVID deaths, there were 24,000 more deaths in New York City than usual. People were experiencing 50 micromorts per day of risk from COVID--about twice the risk of dying as serving in Afghanistan at its most dangerous.
Forbes, in an article in October, 2020, back when they estimated the risks if U.S. deaths were to get to 225,000, calculated that a person age 70 or older who got COVID had the same risk of dying as someone climbing Mt. Everest--i.e. 54,000 micromorts. For a 20-year-old getting COVID had the same risk as driving a car 7,500 miles, i.e. 30 micromorts.
Eliot Nierman
College classmate Eliot Nierman, a physician and medical school professor, wrote me after doing his own calculations and comparisons about risk. His previous guest posts made the case for wearing masks and social distancing. Hospitals were overwhelmed by people who had not taken COVID seriously. Don't do that to your medical community, he urged readers. In some parts of the country hospitals are again overwhelmed, now by people who haven't been vaccinated who hesitated because they worry about the risks in vaccination. They are worrying about the wrong thing, Nierman writes.
Guest Post by Eliot Nierman
For a while I have somewhat facetiously commented that the major risk of a COVID vaccine is driving to the vaccine site. I finally decided to actually do a more quantitative assessment of whether this was true. I used the worst possible numbers for the COVID vaccine- 1 in a million dying. While this may be the case for the subgroup of women age 20 to 50 who got clotting issues with the J&J vaccine, it is not true for the broad population who get vaccinated. They have a much lower risk of death if any. The risks of any major other complication are similarly tiny.
More importantly, this analysis ignores the fact that the net death rate from vaccination is actually negative since the vaccine is so good at protecting from death from covid. 97% of those very sick and likely a similar percent of those dying from covid have not been vaccinated. Right now the chances of dying in the US of COVID if you are not vaccinated is about 1 in a million each day! The chances of dying from driving are about 1 in a million every 3 days.
To sum up, the worst case scenario (greatly overestimating vaccine risk and not including any benefit) is that the chances of dying from the vaccine is 1/2 that of the chances of dying from driving your car for a week. Importantly, you only get vaccinated once so your chances of dying from a covid vaccine are less than 1% that of dying from driving in a year. Your chance of dying from COVID in a year, if you are not vaccinated, is 3 times that of driving for a year and 300 times that of dying from the vaccine! Other serious risks of the vaccine are similarly tiny compared with driving and even worse covid itself.
And remember I am markedly overestimating the risk of the vaccine. I suspect that the risk of the vaccine is actually less than one thousandth the risk of COVID! So if you are worried about dangers from the vaccine, don’t drive for 3 days and you will be ahead in terms of risk. Or would you rather go back to mask wearing?
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