If you buy a ticket, you can win the lottery.
If you go swimming in the ocean, you can get attacked by a shark.
If you catch the flu, you can die from it.
The smart question is usually not “Can x happen?” but rather, “What are the chances that x will happen?” (See also: the false dichotomy fallacy.)
To put it another way, sometimes a simple “yes” or “no” is not enough information. Imagine a clock that only tells whether it’s day or night, a speedometer that only tells whether or not you are moving, or a thermometer that only indicates above or below freezing. I can think of a use for each of those, but I dare say they would be less handy than their normal counterparts.
I bring this up because there is a nasty new(ish) respiratory virus that has (apparently) come from the bowels of a communist research facility and is absolutely bedeviling the world, not only by its own impact, including millions of deaths worldwide, but also by the ineffective, unscientific, and draconian ways that our governments have reacted to it.
Each individual human being is made in the image and likeness of God and is therefore immeasurably valuable. Each individual death is a tragedy, especially if it was preventable. Not only that, but every decision we make reverberates in the world and has consequences both intended and unintended.
The question therefore is not, can a person die from the virus; the question is what are the chances? (And what if anything should we do about it?)
This brings us to risk stratification, which is a heuristic, a mental tool. It is essentially recognizing that different people have different levels of risk for a particular health outcome based on variables such as age, weight, other health conditions, etc.
One of the unique and interesting features of this virus is that it is orders of magnitude more dangerous for some people than it is for others.
Some like to pound the table and say, “The virus is real! It’s not a hoax! You can die from it!”
Smart people think, “No s***, Sherlock, but what are the odds?”
Well, did you know that researchers at Johns Hopkins University have created a tool that can estimate your risk of mortality if you happen to contract the Wuhan virus? You put in some demographic information, your zip code, smoking status, and any pre-existing conditions you have, and it tells you approximately what your individual risk of mortality is.
Check out the press release here and the risk calculator here.
I ran the numbers for myself, and it said my odds of dying from the virus would be around 3 out of a million.
That’s about a 1/333,333 chance, or about 0.0003%. To look at it another way, if I got the virus, I would have about a 99.9997% chance of surviving.
But what if I gave it to someone else? Let’s run the numbers for a few hypothetical infectees.
As a bilingual attorney, I work for a lot of Latinos. Let’s say I gave the virus to someone who was just like me except that he was Latino…
Turns out the results are identical, it’s still a 0.0003% chance of dying vs. a 99.9997% chance of recovery.
OK, let’s say this hypothetical infectee is a woman but otherwise just like me (albeit proportionally shorter and lighter)…
Her mortality risk would be about two out of a million or 0.0002%.
All right, for one last hypothetical let’s say I gave the virus to a 75-year-old white male who is overweight, a former smoker, and has hematological cancer that was diagnosed less than a year ago…
This hypothetical infectee would be at much, much greater risk than me, with around a 6 in ten-thousand chance of dying. That’s about a 1/1,666 chance or 0.06%. His risk of death from the virus would be about two hundred times greater than mine.
Still, he would also have a 99.94% chance of not dying from the virus. (Keep in mind, this is all assuming no one is vaccinated. Presumably, the mortality rate is lower for the “fully vaxxed.”)
Would I do whatever I could to prevent that hypothetical 75-year-old man from getting the virus? You bet your ass I would. But I would also bet on him to beat it if he did get it.
Please do use the calculator for yourself and share it with all of your family, friends, acquaintances, and any traveling salesmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses who come to your door. It helps put things in perspective.
I can’t believe this calculator came out over a year ago, and I only heard about it recently. Subscribe for an upcoming post about other important and interesting news stories you may have missed in the past year.
Further reading:
It’s hard to wrap your head around numbers like this, so check out this article about other low probability events.
Don’t hear what I’m not saying, and keep in mind: low probability risks can’t be ignored.
If you’re really a glutton for perspective, check out this blast from the past. (It didn’t age well, but it brings up a good point vis-a-vis complacency regarding more quotidian dangers.)