Help With Understanding Risk

Risk can be a hard thing to understand and evaluate. What does it mean when someone says that the chance of dying from COVID-19 is about .1% (roughly the case for my age group)? How does that compare with other activities,  like taking a drive out of town to visit friends or having surgery under anesthetic?

In Understanding Risk, Katelyn Jetelina looks at the risk of dying from COVID-19 and provides a framework for comparing it to other activities. It's one of the best articles I've read on the subject. To help explain things, she uses the concept of a MicroMort (MM), or one chance in a million of dying, originally developed in the book Norm Chronicles. For example, for people in my age group, contracting COVID-19, the "cost" is about 6,000 MM. That's roughly equivalent to the risk of a US baby dying during the first year of life. 

Because “dying from COVID-19” is new in our risk repertoire, we can contextualize it by comparing it to other activities, which may help calibrate risk. For example:

• The risk of a 0-4 year old dying from a COVID-19 infection (227 MM) is about the same as the risk of a mom dying from childbirth in the U.S. (210 MM).
• For a vaccinated 18-49 year old, the risk of dying from an Omicron infection (90/48 MM) is less than the annual risk of dying on the road (100 MM).
• For a boosted 50-64 year old, the risk of dying from an Omicron infection (516 MM) is about the same risk as driving for 5 years in the U.S. (500 MM).
• For an unvaccinated 65+ year old, the risk of dying from an Omicron infection (28,978 MM) is about as risky as 1.5 years of heroin use (29,550 MM).
• For a boosted 65+ year old, the risk of dying after an infection (6,023 MM) is about as risky as a baby’s first year of life (6,600 MM). Or, it’s a little more risky than one year of active service in Afghanistan in 2011 (5,000 MM).