[stinkytaco]

> (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point)

Is it beside the point? It's false. Lightning kills about 50 people a year in the US [1]. It's frankly fairly rare to get struck by lightning [2]. More people under 34 have died from COVID-19 per month since April than die from lightning in a year [3] (quick note that the breakdown is 25-34). That's to say nothing of long term health impacts from the disease. If you are going to argue that it's a rational choice, you need to be working from correct assumptions.

And more importantly than that, getting struck by lightning does not mean you will make other people get struck by lightning. Making a choice that makes sense for you does not mean it makes sense for society. That's why we have laws.

[1]: https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html

[3]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

[jdminhbg]

> Lightning kills

OP said "hit by," not "killed by." I wasn't able to find a number for people being struck by lightning in a cursory search other than "hundreds more" than are killed by lightning.

[downandout]

The CDC link he posted for lightning data [1] said that your odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 500,000. Also according to the CDC [2], a total of 1,201 out of a population of ~40 million US people aged 25-34 [3] have died in a “COVID related death” in the US between February 1 and August 19. This represents 3.2% of deaths from all causes during this time period in this age range.

Assuming you believe these numbers to not be somewhat inflated despite widespread reporting of such incidents, the odds of dying from COVID as a 25-34 year old in the US are 1 in ~33,000. This is ~15x times the odds of being struck by lightning. However, I would imagine those odds go down significantly further among 25-34 year olds with no risk factors, and it is largely the people with no risk factors that are going to speakeasy gyms.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html

[2] https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku

[3] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/demographic-statistics

[stinkytaco]

It seems strange to compare getting hit by lightning to dying from COVID-19. That doesn't strike me as a particularly useful comparison. That's also not comparing similar groups. People 25-34 are 1.83 times more likely to die from COVID than all people who are struck by lightning, regardless of age group.

[downandout]

I thought about that, and actually my original answer was the 1.83x number. But then I realized that the apples to apples comparison is 1 in 33,000, because among the 25-34 age group, 1201 out of 40 million in that age group have died. If we are looking solely at this age group, then we can’t dilute the number and say it’s 1201 out of the entire population across age groups.

Re:the relevance of the comparison, I was just responding to the conversation.

[s1artibartfast]

Wikipedia gives a fatality rate of ~10% with the citation below.

Cherington, J. et al. 1999: Closing the Gap on the Actual Numbers of Lightning Casualties and Deaths. Preprints, 11th Conf. on Applied Climatology, 379-80

[true_religion]

Thing is... death by lightning strike is rare because we get out of the rain. If we took no preventative measures, then that number would increase dramatically.