“We’re doing a really terrible job of communicating risk,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “I think that’s also why people are throwing their hands up in the air and saying, ‘Screw it.’ They’re desperate for some sort of guidance.”
To fill that void, scientists are thinking anew about how to discuss Covid risks. Some researchers are working on tools to compare infection risks to the dangers of a wide range of activities, finding, for instance, that an average 43-year-old vaccinated last year is roughly as likely to be hospitalized from an infection as a bull rider is to be hospitalized after a ride. Others have studied when people could unmask indoors if the goal was not only to keep hospitals from being overrun but also to protect immunocompromised people…
Dr. Jetelina, who has published a set of comparisons in her newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist, said that the exercise highlighted how tricky risk calculations remained for everybody, epidemiologists included.
For example, she estimated that the average vaccinated and boosted person who was at least 65 years old had a risk of dying after a Covid infection slightly higher than the risk of dying during a year of military service in Afghanistan in 2011. She used a standard unit of risk known as a micromort, which represents a one-in-a-million chance of dying.
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