[throwaway_2009]

In the UK and US about 0.2-0.3% of the population have died of this thing and we're almost certainly over the worst of it (e.g. annual death rates will be lower going forward) due to vaccination.

It doesn't matter how many times people are fed the stats - they just have different opinions. To some people that's a big number, to others it's trivial.

I have found no way to bridge this gap, it's probably the main reason that I've found the past two years difficult.

You either think it's a non issue because 1-2% of people die every year anyway, or you think it's the worst thing ever because... well I don't know, but lots of people think that and want us to reduce our quality of life dramatically to try and combat it.

[kenrose]

I think it’s because your stats are off.

“The age-adjusted death rate decreased by 1.1% from 731.9 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2017 to 723.6 in 2018.”

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm

So that’s an overall death rate of 0.7% in the US pre COVID. If the death rate becomes 1%-2% with COVID, that’s an increase of 50% - 200% in the number of people dying.

That’s … not negligible.

Whether you think that should affect your “quality of life” I think depends a lot on your level of empathy.

[throwaway_2009]

150K in the UK have died of coronavirus, we have 67 million, that's 0.22%, and most of that was pre-vaccine.

I can't really be bothered to trawl US stats, but I imagine the figures are about the same. Let's say it's 0.3%.

I just don't think that reducing our average annual risk of death by 0.3% is worth doing stuff like locking ourselves indoors or just not doing anything communally any more.

It's _our_ quality of life, fwiw - I'm not the only person that exists, restrictions affect everyone and empathy is applicable to all scenarios.

edit: actually, it's not even annually 0.3%, because it's now been ~21 months since coronavirus hit our shores, so we're looking at ~0.12% or so annually.