What are my chances like?

One evening in that bygone age known as a few weeks ago I was at a dinner party, and the conversation turned to this new virus everyone was making such a fuss about, the coronavirus (or the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19, to be completely accurate). Like a lot of other people, I'd looked at this breakdown by age groups of people who were known to have died from the virus in China. So I told the other people at the dinner party, 'In our age group, we have a 0.2% chance of death. You probably have about as much a chance of dying going scuba-diving or sky-diving - maybe even riding a motorcycle. We're just not that good at comparing risk.'

I was dead right about that last point, and I even managed to exemplify it in the examples I gave, which were, as I later discovered, well off the mark. It turns out that the 2-in-1000 chance you probably have of dying if you get coronavirus before your forties is much higher than the 1-in-about-34 000 chance you have of dying while scuba diving, or the roughly 1-in-100 000 chance you take skydiving. As for riding a motorcycle, it's only if you were doing it in a race that you'd approach the kind of danger you'd face as a thirty-year-old with coronavirus - with a 1 in 1000 chance, you'd only be about half as likely to die as a thirty-year old with Covid-19.

So what kind of thing does give you a 0.2% chance of dying? And, come to that, what sort of activity puts you at something less than a 1% chance of dying, which is starting to look like the best bet for the overall case fatality rate for Covid-19?

The best match for a 2-in-1000 chance (at least on this pretty well-sourced chart I found online) seems to be hang-gliding, whose 1-in-560 risk makes it just slightly less deadly than that. Four bouts as a boxer will get you somewhere near the same amount of risk.

(I'm assuming the chance accumulates when it comes to activities like this, rather than decreasing as it does in the case of multiple coin flips. Dying of a head injury is unfortunately something that increases the more times you get punched, whereas what side a coin lands on isn't affected by what side it fell on last time.)

The closest comparison for the less than 1% risk that a random person with Covid-19 has is Formula 1 racing, which 99 our of every 1000 people are also going to survive. (Of course, those figures likely apply to experienced race-car drivers - if you just jumped into a McLaren and had a go at the next Grand Prix your chances would probably be less than that.) Something that has about twice the risk factor as getting Covid-19 is base-jumping, which has about a 2% fatality rate.

So, if you're under 40, your chances of dying from Covid-19 if you get it are about the same as if you went hang-gliding once (probably assuming you've done it a few times before), or took part in four boxing matches (again, assuming you're not completely untrained). Across all age-groups, getting Covid-19 is about half as likely to kill you as jumping off a cliff or tall building (with a parachute), and presents you with something very like the risk that Lewis Hamilton faces every time he competes.

In conclusion, I clearly under-estimated the risk that even a 0.2% chance of death represents. It's a significantly bigger risk than something like going deep under water with an air-tank strapped to your back. Having said that, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's very dangerous - it may just mean that scuba-diving was even less of a risk than I'd previously thought it was. We don't call off motorcycle racing or Formula 1 because 0.1 or 1% of the competitors are probably going to die (although we have now called them off to stop the spread of Covid-19, interestingly).

Of course, it needs to be noted that these figures represent the (best guess at) the risk for someone who actually contracts the virus, and lots of people won't. (How may will and won't get it over the next few months is something else the experts aren't quite sure about, but I don't think anybody's predicting an 100% infection rate.) It's also worth bearing in mind that these are average figures, and your risk will be higher or lower depending on your other risk factors (especially if you already have other medical conditions).

But, on the whole, it's interesting to think that the overall chance of dying if you get Covid-19 is somewhere between a motorcycle racer's and a base-jumper's. Motorcycle racing and base-jumping aren't activities that we ban, though they're also things that you'd probably want to avoid, unless you were a bit foolhardy. And they, of course, don't really increase the death-risk for anybody else (except maybe rivals you might take out in a crash during your Superbike race).