Thread by @bobscartoons

1. Many people are saying they will not spend Christmas with family because it "just isn't worth the risk".
But how likely is it, given everything we now know, that a person without symptoms will pass the virus to somebody else, with fatal consequences?

2. First of all, given that you have no symptoms, what are the chances that you are infected with Sars CoV-2? The ONS estimates this to be 1 in 115, or 0.87%
ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati…

3. Now, imagining you are infected, but you don’t have any symptoms, what is the probability that you will infect somebody else with Sars CoV-2? Recent studies show this is around 0.7%
jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…

4. If we multiply the probability of these two events, we can calculate the likelihood of you a) being infected & b) passing that infection on without symptoms. This gives a figure of 0.006%

5. To put that figure in context, it’s roughly the same as your chance of dying in a car crash over the course of any given year.

bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/tra…

6. But if you infect someone, this doesn’t mean that they are going to end up dying of Covid pneumonia. Far from it, in fact. There is a lot of debate regarding the IFR of Sars CoV-2, but the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine puts it at roughly 0.5%.
cebm.net/covid-19/estim…

7. Now, if we multiply the chance of infecting another person (without symptoms) by the fatality rate, we can estimate that the risk of “killing” one of your relatives is roughly 0.00003%, or 1 in 3 million.

8. Obviously there are a lot of caveats. If one of your relatives is very old and very ill, then the IFR is going to be higher. If they are relatively healthy, it’s going to be lower.

9. But there’s another caveat. PCR tests. The first number we used (the number of infected individuals in the UK) is based on positive PCR results. It is possible that only 3% of these positive results are accurate.
academic.oup.com/cid/advance-ar…

10. Which means that the risk of a person “killing” a relative without any discernible coronavirus symptoms may well be as low as 1 in 30 million – the same sort of likelihood of you winning the National Lottery.

11. Clearly, it is for individuals to assess risks for themselves and make decisions accordingly. But they should do so in the knowledge of how big those risks actually are. And nobody should be calling others "irresponsible" for taking a risk this minuscule.

12. Finally, this risk isn't just the justification for 'cancelling Christmas', it's the justification for all of it. Lockdowns, masks, school closures, undiagnosed cancers, suicides, stillbirths, unemployment. All done because we were told this specific risk was just too high.

Important to point out that this does not mean nobody is likely to get infected with Sars-CoV-2 and then die from 'Covid' pneumonia.
It means that if that does happen, it is ridiculously unlikely that it happens in this specific way.
And what THAT means is there was never any...

reason why the government couldn't have just said to the general public, "If you feel unwell, stay at home. Everyone else, carry on with life as normal." And then spent some time on making hospitals and care homes a bit safer.