COVID Concern
Worrying about COVID has dropped for many people with only thirty-five percent of U.S. adults being worried about contracting COVID-19. Last April, it was around sixty percent. There are two reasons people might not be worried. First, they have been fully vaccinated. Second, they may now understand that their young age or lack of underlying conditions means that, even if they contract COVID, they are unlikely to have severe symptoms. But for those who have been fully vaccinated, only one in five people have any concern. That is still a large number.
One question that polls tend not to ask is, what exactly are people worried about? Suppose it is about dying. If you have been fully vaccinated, your chance of a breakthrough case (where you die or have severe symptoms) is about 2 in one million (.0002 percent).
Given that, if, for example, you are 50 years old, your odds of dying from any cause in the next year is about 0.5 percent. In other words, you are 2,500 times more likely to die of something else other than COVID-19. Of course, variants may change that if the vaccine you have gotten has no effect at all on them.
So, for the fully vaccinated, relative to other activities you might engage in, how worried should you be about dying, or having severe consequences, from contracting COVID-19?
Perhaps the reason we don’t think this way is because we are anchoring on the news that talks about the new risks of COVID virtually every day. In some cases, we know of someone who has died of COVID or we know someone in the medical field who deals with it every day. This highlights the risk. These sources become magnified as people talk about them all the time. Listening to people’s assessment of risk is probably the worst source of information. For example, FDA has a consumer complaint hotline (Adverse Event Reporting System) and they find that the vast majority of consumers get causation wrong.
So, if you are concerned about risk, find something to do other than hang gliding and don’t canoe down Class 6 rapids. As for driving, I’m looking forward to autonomous vehicles as the vast majority of accidents (94 percent) are caused by drivers.