How scared are you?
The stories are daunting. Young people dying of coronavirus seemingly everyday. How common is this, or do we just hear virtually every story of this type?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-coronavirus-young-patients/
No national mortality data is available, which is remarkable but another story, so I go to Massachusetts mortality data.
https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-may-7-2020/download
And I ask, what is my risk of dying from Coronavirus? Age 57, no pre-existing condition.
From Massachusetts data, population 7 million, 4552 deaths, average age of death is 82, 98.3% with pre-existing conditions. Taking age group data, I broke it down the MA numbers with respect to risk based on pre-existing condition (PEC) or not.
Columns-
Age group
Reported deaths within the age group
% of total MA population that falls within each age group
Population of each age group
Calculated deaths in each age group with PEC
Calculated deaths in each age group without PEC
% chance of dying within age group with PEC
% chance of dying within age group without PEC
1 in x chance of dying within each age group with PEC
1 in x chance of dying within each age group without PEC
View attachment 246139
Since the chance of death percentages are so small, they can be hard to interpret, thus the "1 in x" chance columns. This is historical data up to today. If you are reading this, you are alive.
Since this is prior data, I would look at this as future risk going into the next five months, when deaths totals may double.
So how screwed am I? Well, age group 50-60 without PEC says I have a 0.0003% chance of ending up dead. Better yet, I'd say it is a 1 in 355,000 chance of dying. I'll take those odds.
If I had a pre-existing condition, I would start to get worried and take serious precautions. The odds of dying are still pretty low, but I would worry about a prolonged hospital stay and the potential for lasting damage (don't know this risk though).
The real danger is for those over 80 with around a 1% chance of catching CV and dying from it. Note, most won't catch it, but if you do, the outlook is much worse.
Ages from 0-20 have a much greater chance of dying from the seasonal flu.
Note that if you go to lengths to protect yourself, your odds improve.
These are numbers that should roughly represent the national story, but certainly there will be differences. If you think it is 10x worse somewhere else, then move a decimal point.
Pre-existing conditions come in many flavors, so this exercise doesn't represent a breakdown of individual risks.
The numbers also don't speak of permanent damage from coronavirus, but there is not much available information. My non-educated guess would be a large percentage of those with lasting effects were those on respirators. Certainly others issues have been reported but we don't have an idea of the prevalence, other than these issues are not very prevalent.
And it is just a thought exercise to put context into what general risk there is for age demographics in the context of the never ending onslaught of death totals.