The odds are low for an individual. Sadly, 2% is a bigger deal when you get on a bus, walk through an airport, use an elevator, go to a public restroom, or walk down a crowded sidewalk.
This isn’t an issue of your health or my health. It’s an issue if everyone’s health.
This is what COVID is like — First roll two D4: If you rolled a 1 in the first, you now have a liver injury; If you rolled a 1 on the other, you lose your sense of smell.
Now roll a D20:
• 1-4: asymptotic but still infectious
• 5-16: somewhere up to “mild pneumonia”
• 17-19: severe symptoms (dyspnea, hypoxia, etc)
• 20: critical symptoms (respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan dysfunction)
And that’s with treatment. All that “flattening the curve” talk early last year was about making sure people could still get treatment — if you exceed the capacity of the healthcare system, you don’t get to save all the people whose conditions would have been well within your capacity in a non-overloaded system.
