I wanted to try and work out the risk of dying from Covid-19 compared to other causes for the USA. I think you have to be a statistician to do it properly. Also the result very much depends on your age and health. The odds of a young person dying of Covid-19 is much less than for an 80-year-old with diabetes, for instance. If you are a school kid you are almost immune from death from the disease whereas around 10% of elderly die from it once they have the infection.
THIS COMPARISON IS SIMPLY MEANT TO PROVOKE THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT HUMANKIND IS DOING IN RESPONSE TO THE PANDEMIC. PERSONALLY I FAVOUR THE SWEDISH APPROACH.
Also I am comparing lifetime odds of death from selected causes in 2018 with the simplistic odds of being one of the deaths from Covid-19. Can you make such a comparison? I am not sure that you can but it may provide a feel for the odds.
To work out the odds of dying from Covid-19 in the USA I simply divided the number of deaths as at the date of this post into the population of the USA at this time. I think that’s a fair but crude way because I am generalising and it is a snapshot on one day whereas the other figures are lifetime odds for 2018. It is complicated.
Warning: because an accurate comparison is probably impossible, I wouldn’t take too much away from these numbers. The idea, as mentioned, is to provoke thought because we accept all the other odds as normal and do very little about them but the reaction to Covid-19 is to damage the US economy to an extent only previously seen in the depression of the 1930s. The economies of some European countries have bee shattered by their government’s approach to dealing with the disease. Will things get back to normal quickly? I think not. It may take years to get back to what life was like Christmas 2019.
What has this got to do with cats? Well, it’s the old argument I have used before. What affects us affects our cats. If we die of Covid-19 our cat loses her human guardian. That’s a big deal. Also cats can get the disease from humans. There is connection there. We don’t know if anyone has got the disease from their cat, however. BE SAFE.
