Based on some of your arguments, I have a hard time believing you’re a medical doctor. A lot of your posts just repeat talking points and don’t show a true or fair understanding of the situation.
Yes a car accident can hurt other people. But there aren’t asymptomatic car accidents nor is it likely that you have a car accident and hit Suzie and Suzie goes home and transmits the car accident to the 4 people in her household who transmit it to 6 more people each, etc. etc.
There’s a difference between risk management and risk elimination. Do you also support forgoing seatbelts, condoms, helmets, life preservers, etc. because they’re imperfect? CPR is not 100% effective. If someone stops breathing should we just shrug our shoulders and say “sucks to be you, people die.” Does your freedom mean it’s up to the food service worker who prepares your food to decide whether to wash his/her hands before making your food? Does it allow a restaurant to decide it doesn’t believe in refridgerating the poultry they serve you? Or are there times when public safety requires restricting personal freedom?
See my response to @oreo_mom above. If you’re not local and you don’t go to the DC neither your riding accidents nor your car accidents will be burdening California hospitals.
Which is why (fun fact!) we have LAWS for those wishing to participate in such a dangerous activity, like having a driver’s license, being required to wear a seat belt, obey traffic signals, use your turn signal, and “drive sober or get pulled over.”
It’s called reducing risk.
It is impossible to remove the risk of injury or death.
It does NOT follow, then, that there is no value in reducing it.
Reducing the COVID risk of spread and death means wearing a mask, maintaining 6’+ distance when around people, and staying the f*** home except for essential activity (grocery shopping, for example).
Horse shows are not essential.
Is this that trash people tried to spread like “they died with COVID not from COVID - they had a pulmonary embolism!”
Wtf caused the PE???
I mean, car accident deaths are definitely over-reported then. I bet a lot of those people actually die from blood loss, internal hemorrhaging, or crushed skulls. Not from cars.
If we assess the risk of getting COVID now, it’s high, right? But let’s say we wait until we all have two doses of the vaccine - then it would make more sense to compete. So, invariably, the risk will actually go down if people wait and get vaccinate, correct? Therefore, your argument to continue on as we have been is null, considering the risk will change, and while COVID is, as you said “NEVER GOING AWAY,” it will eventually become less dangerous if we are to vaccinate. It begs the question, then, why should we continue on as we have been if we can be a little patient and wait?
Yes, the risk of getting infected with COVID is higher than the risk of getting infected with influenza for the same person similarly exposed to both viruses.
It would “make more sense to compete” if your evaluation of “sense” is an absolute reduction in COVID cases. But there are other factors that must be evaluated. Remember, this entire COVID response started as an attempt to reduce the surges in ICU admits, “Flatten the curve”, which I believe to be a noble goal WHEN you believe that the ICUs will be overwhelmed without intervention. However, we now know that this is unlikely to happen. Our treatments are much better in early-stage disease and we understand the natural course of the disease much better in discrete populations.
However, I am much more interested in the quality of life and personal agency than absolute COVID mortality reductions, as these are already low across most patient populations, significantly lower than early estimates made by the now-discredited models which initiated our early aggressive response.
COVID will become less lethal than it already is mostly due to advances in treatment. Vaccination will undoubtedly create lower case severity, especially among the high-risk populations, but for the 80% of the population that are not at high-risk, vaccination will have little effect on significant-morbidity and mortality, because the rates are already fairly low.
This is a good question, one that requires a great deal of thought for me. I suppose my off-the-cuff and simple response would be that for me and my family, the risks of horse-showing in a COVID era are worth it when compared to the benefits received. For others, this will undoubtedly not be the case. I’m thankful that for the most part, we live in a country where people are free to make those sorts of evaluations for themselves.
Wow because mortality rates are low for certain populations, they shouldn’t modify their behaviour to protect those with a much higher risk of death from Covid? We should just let everybody over 65 die?
And hey, only 1% of people who get it will actually die (never mind those with permanent lung damage and debilitating symptoms that could last for months or years).1% of the American population is only 3,250,000 people. Since 400,000 Americans have already died from Covid, congratulations! That means only 2.85 million more to go. Small price to pay for the pleasure of showing your horse, or the freedom of not wearing a mask, or to avoid the inconvenience of waiting for a vaccine, right?
I’m not sure where you interpreted my response(s) to suggest that I believe "[we] should just let everybody over 65 [years of age, I assume] die? I have dedicated my professional life to just the opposite, so no, I do not believe we should stand by and allow anybody to die against their will.
I think you may be misunderstanding how these numbers work.
Firstly, not everybody who gets the disease will be identified and added to the case totals. The most recent CDC guidance states that 40% of those infected with COVID-19 will be completely symptom-free. The vast majority of these people will never be tested. Our case counts are significantly higher by the current CDC best estimates than actually reported by at least a third.
This has the effect of lowering the mortality of the actual disease. When we examine disease risk, you cannot apply universal thought patterns to every patient. The art of differential diagnosis requires physicians to understand the relative likelihood or prevalence of diseases in the patient’s unique population – based on sex, age, race, lifestyle, BMI, etc. So, applying a mortality statistic universally to the entire population is mathematically inaccurate but clinically negligent.
Unfortunately, this is precisely what you have done.
Actually, the numbers for age-specific infection fatality rates are extremely low among children and young adults, measuring 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at 25. However, the rate progressively increased with age, growing from 0.4% at 55 to around 15% at 85.
This is among those infected (a smaller number than the population) who become symptomatic (a smaller number than those infected).
Please see this study to get an idea of the relative risks of death for COVID vs. other diseases by age:
You can see that transportation accidents and homicides are FAR more likely to kill the average horse show attendee than COVID. We must remain vigilant and unemotional in our assessment of risk when we start down the slippery slope of authoritarianism.
Bottom line: for certain populations, COVID is a non-issue, and for others, it is quite lethal, and for those populations, we must absolutely remain careful with our interactions. But do not overestimate the likelihood of either contracting the disease or dying from it, especially when making choices for other people, regardless of how trivial you personally believe those impositions may be.
You’re missing the point that some of us aren’t concerned only about the risk to the horse show attendees. Some of us are worried about the volunteers and show staff they will encounter, the servers at the restaurants they go to, the cashiers at the stores they visit, the workers at the grocery stores, hotels, gas stations, and countless other people who they may come in contact with. And of course those back at home to whom the horse show attendee may spread the virus when they return. And on top of that the local residents who don’t need outsiders clogging up their already overstretched healthcare facilities because they fell off their horse.
When people who can stay home do stay home, it helps keep those who can’t stay home safer.
Trophy - You seem to be missing the fact that parts of southern CA are triaging care. So if you get in that “more likely” car accident and are unable to be revived quickly in the field, you will be out of luck. If you need ICU care for whatever reason, you might be screwed. Maybe it will get better, maybe not. But the healthcare system is inundated right now and we should all trying to make it better not worse.
I’m not sure she’s missing the point as much as she just doesn’t care. Her approach to risk analysis seems to revolve solely around “how risky is it for me?” Screw everyone else. Sadly, that seems to have been a common theme in America’s response to the pandemic.
You have clearly not seen the number of riders in the older amateur divisions in California. Kidding/not kidding.
I do get your point about the denominator number of cases) being artificially low, thereby skewing the percent mortality For example they’re estimating that 33% of the people in LA county have had Covid, but the official tally is 10%. I do wonder if the under reporting of cases is consistent across all age groups given that the elderly are probably likelier to end up hospitalized and certainly likelier to die; hence, there cases might be likelier to get counted. Unless large numbers of them just quietly die at home.
A friend has done a statistical analysis via a series of blogs and initially was using hospitalizations as the best marker (more consistent across various geographic and socioeconomic demographics, but not lagging cases by as much as deaths do) and then extrapolated back somehow.
This whole thread would make a great sit-com: the CA setting, the moral self righteousness and the saving the world attitude. I bet some of these posters are giving homes to illegals as well!!!
