[shoguning]

It's not selfish to be out and about if you are young and healthy. The recovery rate for 20-30 YO is 99.99%+, and if you are healthy it's likely higher[1].

It's on the same order of risk as driving. Many young people die driving every year, yet we still do it plenty, with reasonable precautions. If you take reasonable precautions, are young and healthy, it is a risk worth taking to many.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2

[tedsanders]

We also outlaw speeding because speeding increases the odds that you kill someone else. Catching COVID, even if you recover, increases the odds that you kill someone else through a chain of infections. Remember that R is above 1 in most locations in the world right now. Tens of thousands of people are dying a day right now because not everyone is taking the precautions they have been asked to take. In countries with high compliance, death rates are very low. Mass death is not inevitable.

Note that the OP said it was selfish to be out and about, not against self interest. So your statistic is irrelevant to the point made. Selfish means you're benefiting yourself while harming others. That's exactly what happens if you catch COVID, pass it on, and then recover. You're fine. Others may not be.

[shoguning]

> We also outlaw speeding because speeding increases the odds that you kill someone else.

We could go further and outlaw cars that don't have speed governors. That would save lives. Lower speed limits would save more lives as well. Now we have a balance between freedom and safety.

> Tens of thousands of people are dying a day right now because not everyone is taking the precautions they have been asked to take.

That was true during the flu season of 2018 as well. The excess deaths from COVID are higher, but not orders of magnitude higher (more like 3x) [1]. The response is off the charts, economically and culturally devastating. Not the right balance.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

[tedsanders]

The reason excess deaths are only 3x higher is because of our precautions. If we let it burn through the US, millions would die and the ratio would be more like 100x (30,000 vs 3 million). Obviously depends on some hard-to-model assumptions. Your conclusion might be right, but your argument is terribly misleading.

(Plus, letting it burn through the whole population comes with downside risks of more mutations.)

[shoguning]

> The reason excess deaths are only 3x higher is because of our precautions.

It's a hard case to make. Sweden for example has had less excess death than harsher lockdown countries like Spain & UK.

Lockdowns have done little if anything in US states. New York and Florida have similar stats (worse in NY if anything).

[scarmig]

On the other hand, it has a very high number of excess deaths compared to Norway, Denmark, Finland, which are perhaps more comparable countries.

[MereInterest]

From your statistic, I would conclude that it is not self-destructive for young people to be out and about. Whether it is selfish is another matter entirely. Taking an action that is beneficial to oneself, but harmful to others, is typically described as selfish.

Edit: To be fair, the same argument can be made in reverse as well, that it is selfish for older people to insist on universal lockdowns, which primarily benefit themselves. To that, I would argue (1) that death is not the only negative result from covid-19, and (2) that the relative magnitudes of benefits and harms need to be compared.