chez,
It's you that's "missing something here" - and that something is the big picture. All your special pleading one way ignores the stuff that goes the other way. You special pleading is too small scoped and influenced by anxiety.

The risk of them getting covid is a basic Fermi problem and the odds I quoted are close enough that the point doesn't change - it's really quite dumb not to plan to go as far as death or illness risk goes.

Kind of glad for these mass gatherings. I mean let's get this show on the road since reducing it doesn't seem to be a significant amount of the population's goal this can help not drag it out so long.
All these people in tight quarters shouting like a choir and eventually police will start going through footage and arresting people. County jails are a great place to help the spread.
LFG!

You can't just say it's a fermi problem and claim victory.

It's like considering a monogamous couple where one has a one night stand of unprotected sex. The chance of giving their own partner a STD cannot ignore the fact that the 3rd person they had sex with is more likely than average to be infected just because they are the sort of person who has unprotected one night stands.

and this is reason not anxiety. I'm one of the most laid back dudes you will ever meet

I'm not saying that there are no objections to be made, I'm saying that the objections you've put forward so far are completely invalid and about 3 levels below where the conversation is. Your objections have already been explicitly incorporated into the model by me before you even thought them. Even besides that the model is primed to majorly overstate the odds of catching it, not understate it.

1 in 20K chance of death from covid is a perfectly reasonable worst case estimate for being in Florida for 10 days in August. And I maintain that 1 in 20K is a number that's insane to make any life choices on. The only reason you'd be so foolish as to change your plans on a number that tiny is irrational anxiety.

I’ve travelled quite a lot too and never got the recommended vaccinations. Once in Mexico I was going for a long walk and spotted a water bottle on the ground with a blue liquid in it. I was thirsty and wasn’t going to let some germs ruin my parade. I did end up with burning while urinating but I think that was dehydration and the mystery liquid probably saved me.

and I'm saying you've missed that a good estimate of your risk is of the order of the most risky person in the group. That underestimates the risk more as the group grows larger.

You can insist you're 3 levels ahead but if you've missed that, you've missed what matters in your rush to get to the far less relevant stuff.

What you seem to be missing, and what other seem to have a better grasp of, is effects are cumulative and cannot be observed in isolation.

One in 20k is insanely higher for participation in a discrete event. If, during the Covid crisis, you make 19 other equally risky choices then you reduce the risk of death to 1 in 1000, with a 5% chance of being hospitalised.

Secondly, while in Florida if we "have a big night drinking" we not only increase the chance of exposure by human contact, but increase the chance of death by lowering immune functioning. Just read the first sentence to get the gist.

In fact, we could quite possibly make 19 other risky choices while on holiday in Florida, and each of these risky choices could impair our immune functioning to further increase the relative risk.

In sum, the additional risks are not "priced in" to your back of a cigarette-packet calculation of 1 in 20,000. This number covers Florida residents taking a average number of precautions, not risk-tolerant tourists doing Florida tourist stuff.

Yeah, that is an absurd post from TS. Like elrazor said, 1 in 20000 chance of death for a discrete event is so high. There is no way I am doing that (in before TS calls me irrational and a moron who cannot think). If you do 50 of these events over the course of 3 months of a pandemic, your odds of dying get pretty tangible (19999/20000^50).

There was one fairly big assumption that went unnoticed in TS' post as well. He said we can treat everyone in the group as 1 member, but then "gave us leeway" and counted it as 3 people. A group of 10+ people does not function as a group of 3.

just another quick point as i think no one mentioned it - its not only about personal risk. If you catch it and on average r0>1.0 then the risk for the population as a whole is much bigger with the cumulative transmission from you and ppl you infect and so on, thats a big reason u cant think only in terms of individual risk (well u still can but its a pretty narrow egoistical view )

Interesting to look at how different cultures / societies perform. Shows you how delusional the sense of self & free will is.
But if you can look at it with as little bias as possible, you can influence your individual behaviour accordingly.
The more reckless you are in a individualistic society, the better the society accepts you and vice versa, with irrational local exceptions.
Then again, maverick behaviour is attractive to many

Sure it does, for the purposes of covid, as most socializing is in-group. A group of 10 that travel and socialize together would have the infection acquisition rate of at most 2 people living normally in Florida imo.

Why do people disagree with me when I'm obviously right? Boggles the mind. Also, I assume 5% is a typo and you mean 0.5%.

I deliberately overstated the risk with 1 in 20,000 (it's certainly lower). But you guys are still quibbling.

So reality check on your "1 in 1000" for 20 risky events absurdity: Since the pandemic started 7 months ago, 700K people are dead (let's assume double official numbers). With 7 billion people in the world, you had a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying summed across all of your actions during those many months. Most of those deaths occurred from transmission while living as normal and doing "risky behavior". Most of this was concentrated in a few dense cities during winter - of which Florida wasn't one.

The odds in Florida are the same over those many months of people kissing, partying, shopping, having sex, living with family, working in retail/fast food/airports/restaurants etc - about 1 in 10,000 of dying. Over months. Most of those very old. It's about 1 in 100,000 over months in Florida if you don't have preexisting conditions and aren't very old. The same odds as many ordinary events/outings.

Flu season is actually a bigger risk for old people (kills 1% of old, 10-30% of the population gets it) than covid is at the transmission/infection rates in Florida now and likely in August. Yet few people change family plans because it's flu season. Avoiding spending 10 days in Florida because of covid is crazy.

Are there any bored actuaries in here that wanna take a stab at this hypothetical?

I think heat, sunlight and contact tracing/isolation will keep it below 1 in some places while remaining well above 1 in other places with poorer systems in place (some of the US definitely fits in that) or where the R0 is naturally very high (e.g. dense cities with lots of promiscuity). I think the 3x spread levels we saw in winter are probably gone for a good while due to a combination of summer and major behavioral changes/some things still closed like clubs and giant conferences (one in Malaysia spread it to 2500 for example)/immunity in some of the largest spreader nodes.

Prolonged economic damage and going back through lows is certain at this point imo baring some large development like a very early vaccine.

I wonder how many posters arguing with TS about risk are fat, drink, smoke and participate in other activities that will very likely shave many years off of their life expectancy and life quality.

In some ways, Covid is our first social media disease, where people are drumming themselves up into fervor and paranoia. People trying to insert any sort of moderation into discussion seem to immediately typecast as "Covid denier/hoaxer/etc." It is very reminiscent of this new age of social media politics.

Covid is a risk but it is important to keep things in perspective. The risk is much higher for some people - the same sort of people who are always at high risk with almost every other disease.

For a country so fat and so full of self-inflicted diseases, it is rather ironic to see how America is panicking about a disease that will have a very small effect. But maybe this is just the Internet, where mostly people with strong opinions post things. When I go outside here in NYC, lots of people are on the streets, kids playing, couples picnicking in parks, families BBQing, people running and cycling more than ever, outdoor takeout spots crowding with people, etc.

So your idea of a "reality check" is to take one of my original criticisms, that you have pulled numbers out of your arse, and double down by doing the same thing again?

Putting this aside for one moment, you have still claimed that 20,000-1 is a negligible risk when it patently isn't, and failed to account for the obvious fact that people going on holiday are on average going to engage in more risky behaviour than they would if they were at home in the context of the covid situation. Your reasoning that 10 people going away together is actually the same as two is equally flawed unless they are all going to go to the bathroom together in a restaurant.

It's also wrong to state that the majority of transmission occurred when outside of lockdown. Most countries locked down when numbers were in two or three figures, and by the time they began lifting them many were in four or five figures. For example, the UK locked down ~300 deaths and currently sits at 30k+.

I could go on as so many of your claims are clearly not thought through, but it's a futile exercise as I doubt it will make any difference to your hubris on the topic.

<15% body fat, rarely drink, have never smoked. Cycled 16 miles today in a hour, did 20k steps yesterday and did a TRX session in my garden Saturday.

Your first time debating toothy, I see.

Wonder if there is anything here?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-h...-idUSKBN2370OQ

-Although if you look at US data on Worldometer it seems deaths are dropping proportionally with new cases (accounting for time lag), and it isn't obvious the mortality/morbidity rate is dropping at all, which we would see if the virus is actually mutating into a weaker strain.

It's an estimate. Numbers weren't out of anywhere, they were eminently reasonable, then deliberately biased hard to higher risk to get a lower bound. If you think the numbers aren't reasonable then propose others.

Your criticisms weren't cogent. For example, when I reality check this ridiculous take:
It shows by extension show that the numbers I gave were very conservative.
If you're making life decisions on 1 in 20K risks (and even better once you consider mitigating factors), you're not a sane person imo. Nor are you consistent; people do 1 in 20K activities all the time. Driving cross country rather than flying for example. Going traveling with elderly family members in flu season, which is WAY worse than covid at current infection rates. Swimming in the ocean, hiking, promiscuous sex, heavy drinking. Should people also not do that, because omg 1 in 20K bro!

You're assuming something that's not in evidence. Covid is spread mostly by prolonged close contact with external (from your group) infection sources. That's why the R0 is 3 rather than 50. So coworkers spread it, Tinder hookups spread it, etc. You have zero reason to believe that 10 people holidaying together, mostly socializing and traveling together, are more likely to get it. There's good reason to believe they're less likely to get it.

You're assuming bathrooms are a meaningful source of spread because you don't know anything and are holding forth out of ignorance. Covid is spread primarily by close indoor social contact with people with whom you socialize or share indoor room space for a long time.

My analysis is excellent and based on data and facts; you have no clue what you're on about.

Another dumb take. The peak of deaths happened 3-4 weeks after lockdown. Given the death lead time (average 18 days, tail 30+ days), these people were infected before lockdown. Ergo, wrong again.

They're highly thought through and based on facts and data about covid. You're just completely ignorant about the topic and have no clue about the subject matter. That's not my fault.

Lower viral loads could mainly or entirely be thanks to physical distancing, better hygiene and warmer and sunnier weather.

Count me in. But then I'm an Epicurean hedonist whose also more worried about the rest of the family (and even wider society) than myself.

None of which has anything much to do with the arguments.

Right so you pulled numbers out of your arse, admit to pulling them out of your arse but then amazingly all the conclusions you drew from them are still valid, regardless of how wrong they are.

You should get a job in The Humanities...

A Fermi estimate isn't "pulled out my ass", it's a considered estimate based on what we know about covid.
You should do any degree in hard sciences so you can grasp the concept of a lower bound/a Fermi estimate, and not flail around with invalid objections that are off by more than an order of magnitude.

There are 2 separate issues here.

1. Is the chance of death from covid in Florida for a family group arriving for 10 days in August likely to be greater than 1 in 20,000 (strong no).

2. Is this probability a valid reason to avoid an activity for which it's important enough that there is "significant family pressure" to do it. (strong no using any criteria we use to judge other risk/rewards)

You lose handily on both of those.

1, I've never made an argument that this is or is not the case, so;

2, Is invalid.

Wanted to say this. Too early to say given how little we know on this virus. It's not bad obv. Especially if the people with low viral load will get immunity against high viral loads.

Top Doc in Italy saying thay the coronavirus no longer clinically exists there. The strain of the virus now is basically much weaker than before.

This is what is going to happen as i said before. This virus will basically burn out or adapt to live with humans so it can survive. There is no end of world secnario. There is no end of humanity scenario. In some months from now this will finally be nearing the end.