i am so confused wrote:
I continue to be baffled by the hysterical response to a far, far milder version of a disease that was already extremely unlikely to cause healthy people any harm.
Omicron is like a cold…OMG WEAR N95s!!!
It makes zero sense. I no longer understand humans.
This is something that I can definitely chime in on, it's actually what I did my second master's thesis on.
First though, the definition of risk is the severity of an outcome multiplied by the likelihood of it occuring. The severity of omicron is almost certainly less than that of delta, but because it is more transmissible, you're more likely to get it. On the individual level, if you're healthy you might like your chances and say your risk is lower, and you're probably right. From a public health standpoint, a lot of cases is going to mean a lot of hospitalizations (even if the rate per infection is lower), which overburdens the healthcare system, which leads to poor outcomes for all sorts of things. From that point of view, we'd say that the risk is as high as it's always been, and we'd probably be just as right as you are.
Second, and this was my thesis topic, the public abso-fricking-lutely terrible at judging risk. You might have someone who smokes be worried about getting cancer from their cell phone. Someone who drives 40,000 miles a year for work might be afraid of flying. People panicked over ebola, which had almost no chance of spreading within the US, but will forgo measles vaccination even though there are frequent outbreaks. It's also almost impossible to change people's risk perception once they've made their initial determination. If someone has decided they're afraid of plane crashes, no amount of education on the safety of air travel will change their mind, even when you compare it to the risk of driving.