We see lots and lots of coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of it’s clickbait. Some of it can inform us, sometimes in great depth. We can find, for example, many in-depth accounts of what hospitalization or ‘long COVID‘ is like. But very little of it – almost none – gives us much in the way of practical, useful information for risk assessment.
In particular, the news coverage doesn’t give us a good sense of the proportional danger to specific groups of people. This goes even more so for the delta variant, where the vast majority of the coverage presents misleading information. In that last sentence, I linked to the CDC’s overview, which is much more informative than the news coverage. With delta, the news veers between COVID denialism and gross exaggeration of the risk to specific groups, children prominent among them.
So, I’m going to take a crack at risk assessment here. I’ll present CDC data and draw tentative inferences about risk by age and vaccination status. Let’s see if I can provide some of the missing risk assessment info.
