[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.