@oregon101 – your chances of dying this year from a Covid 19 infection are far less than your chances of dying from any number of other causes. On an individual level, risk is quite low. The reason for the extreme efforts to curtail the spread (school closures, bans on large gatherings, pressure for social distancing) – is because the very small fraction of people who will die - or be at risk of dying – is enough to completely overwhelm our health care system if the number of exposures/infections gets too high.
And when that happens it will impact health care for all sorts of things – that is, if the hospitals get overwhelmed, you are just as likely to die from lack of access to treatment for something else entirely as from coronavirus.
The leading cause of death in our age group (over 65) is heart disease and cancer. About 650,000 people in the US will die of heart disease this year, another 600,000+ from cancer. But they don’t all show up at the hospital at the same time to die, nor do they all need the same intense level of care (ventilators, prolonged time in ICU).
I’m not a statistician, but I don’t think that your individual risk of dying will change materially because of Covid 19. That is, I’m age 66 and social security actuarial tables put my risk of dying this year at around 1%. Maybe enough old people will die from the pandemic to tweak that number up slightly – but not something high enough to be stressing over.
The reason that you and I need to stay home and avoid socializing and crowds is NOT because of a huge risk that we will get infected and die, but because of the risk that we might get infected and NOT get too sick and NOT die… in which case if we are going about our normal business we would spread the virus to many more people. Even an 80-year-old is far more likely to live than to die from the virus – but if you have six or seven 80-year-old’s infected, then odds are that at least one of them will die.
A 35-year-old is much less likely to die, but if 500 35-year-old’s are infected, then odds are that one of them will die.
So that’s why they shutting down places & events where people congregate. Because if people don’t come in contact with the virus, they won’t get sick – and the medical profession is hoping to push things out enough that they can handle the load and (I hope) also develop better treatment protocols. For example, if they find out that a particular antiviral drug or combination of drugs is effective – then they will be able to give more patients drugs and rely less on ventilators.
So seriously – right now from your post it seems that the biggest threat from Covid 19 is your mental health – and I think that is a very real concern, because even though I live alone and am in introverted homebody in any case, I am already feeling the depressive effects of this forced sequestration. Social isolation is a huge risk factor for depression – and yet here we are.
couple from our church with children middle school age (dh and I were in our early 20s). . Our daughter died. The dh from that couple owned the local funeral home. It may sound crazy to outsiders, but knowing he was the one who went to the hospital and lovingly took care of her (which he later shared was one of the hardest things he had ever done) was what kept me from going off the deep end. Looking back yrs later, we had nothing in common with that family. Our paths crossing when they did was not coincidence. We would normally not have been in that family’s friend group. Our paths crossed bc I needed them in my life. They brought me so much comfort