[lawrenceRaider]

Originally Posted by DaFace

I kind of hate the 99% numbers whether we're talking about COVID risk or vaccine risk or anything else. I've generally found that most people don't even understand what the numbers mean, let alone how they relate to anything tangible, yet people love to throw them out as proof of something.

My favorite example recently was that a county commissioner here in Colorado recently said that kids are more likely to die from being hit by an asteroid than they are to die from COVID. I get the gist of what she was trying to say (that kids are relatively unlikely to die from COVID), but she was trying to compare the likelihood that the Earth would be hit by an asteroid in the next 300 years to the likelihood that a kid has died from COVID in the past year. (And...uh...not many kids have died from asteroids, so there's that.)

Shit like that happens all over the place, and it adds next to nothing to the conversation. Yes, you're relatively unlikely to die from COVID. Yes, you're even less likely to have an adverse affect from a vaccine. But saying that 99% of people are fine in either situation implies that it can't happen, when the reality is that 1 out of 100 people dying would be a **** ton of dead people. Because of that, there's a ton more to discuss than "99%" of anything.

A more apt comparison would be kids are more likely to be harmed/die in a car wreck than from COVID.