Dealing With Anxiety During This Time

I like thinking about the numbers regarding corona to relieve stress. Our immediate family is in a moderate to low risk group (early 50s parents with no major health issues, teenage kids). Even in a virus sweep of 40% of the population the joint probability of both of us parents dying is vanishingly small. My best guess as to one dying? Less than 0.1%. Kids’ probabilities are much lower in my opinion. All that is comforting to me. I’ll take those odds, especially as i really have no choice in the matter :slight_smile:

I do not fixate on potentially serious but not fatal outcomes. I feel confident that we can survive and we have no fear of discomfort and pain. Life is too short to stress about what cannot be controlled anyway.

It occurs to me that catching the virus right now ironically might be the best thing. On the very small chance that one or both of us parents need hospitalization, it is probably better to need it quickly, rather than later when the curve begins to ramp up. I have seen the stats. A 0.5% infection rate at any given time will overwhelm the hospital system in the United States in the medium term. I assume that will happen, so that removes an unknown for me that I would otherwise worry about. I waste no time believing that the curve can be flattened to avoid this outcome, but remain open to the happy possibility that I will be proven wrong.

Catching the virus early could also have social benefits, as any of our family who catches it and survives will be contributing to the necessary herd immunity that must be achieved because i very much doubt that vaccines or highly effective treatments will be available any time soon.

Of course, my biggest anxiety concerns our elderly parents, two in their early 80s and two in their early nineties, one with significant health challenges. Nevertheless, all of them have similar philosophies regarding pain and suffering, and are not anxious in the least about all this. Each is comforted by the idea that he or she has been extremely lucky to have lived such a full and long life, and that nothing was promised at birth. At least each says some variation of, “If this kills me off, that’s life.”

All that being said, even given their ages, based on the information coming out of Italy (which is likely worse than what we would experience here), it is hard to see a greater than 10% chance of death from corona for those of our parents without significant health issues, maybe 30% chance for the one with them. There are so many unknowns of course, and this assumes US fatality rates in an overwhelmed system (such as that of Italy) of maybe 15% for the elderly and a US virus sweep of 40% of the population. Those estimates are likely biased upwards because of better resources in the US.

Even typing all this out is helping to ease any stress, including that associated with financial dislocations due to what is truly an unprecedentedly fast collapse in the economic aggregates. Just a few ideas that others may find could help. If not, just ignore.