Check out your comparative chances of covid death

If you are 65 to 74, your Life Risk table looks like this:

The comparison of life risks for the elderly, looks like this:

If you’re 75 or over, you probably do think sometimes about pneumonia in the annual flu season, or cancer. Understandably. You probably do modify your lifestyle to reduce these risks: you wrap up warm and you try not to get wet; you stop smoking, or eating tomatoes (no – seriously!).

But you definitely don’t go into a hermetic bunker till the Grim Reaper shoves an appointment card under the steel-shuttered door.  You behave a bit more like this newly (and rightly) famous gentleman:

For younger readers (under 65), you do think about your ordinary Life Chances, on a day-to-day basis. Some worry more than others. Some have real cause to worry more than others.

Since 23 March and 14 May 2020, all 66 million people living in Britain have serious cause to worry a lot more about all of the these 3 categories. The elderly have been given the additional burden of seeing the sky-rocketing trajectory of figures for geriatric deaths (which are only to do with the acts of Govt UK, not any virus).

The world in which we live, with its chances of life-altering events (good and bad), presents these kinds of odds:

That punk was staring down a 1 in 6 chance of having his brains blown out over Hollywood Boulevard. For it to happen now, of course, Dirty Harry would have to be standing at last a clear 2 metres away.

So, how much do these potential events occupy your mind in an average day?

·           Getting hit by lightning

·           Catching HIV in from a woman

·           Having to make an Oscar-winning speech

·           Being in a fatal car accident

You’re honest answer is that, apart from the last one, you can actually count on the fingers of one hand the times you’ve ever thought about it.

We do all think a bit more often than that about dying in a car crash, and about car crashes in general. There’s a reason for that. The world of car driving is a hyper-reality in itself. You can get through life without ever actually driving a car. You can even get through life without being a car passenger.

Bus and train doesn’t count in this statistical thinking. The last people to die in a bus accident were the tragic victims of the 7/7 2005 terror bombings in London.

When you get behind the wheel of a car, even if you’re not quite as adventurous as the Top Gear trio, you have in the back of your mind that the roads are full of the nutters and the careless. That’s why the government makes you do pass a test, do an MOT, and have insurance.

So, driving deaths happen in a world with its own special rules. The rules and risks are very different to other parts of life. It is a Hyper-Reality. This is a really important psychological point. We will have a detailed look in a later Chapter at how our minds and feelings work in states of Hyper-Reality. And importantly, how to think and feel better in Hyper-Reality.

From: CORONAPHOBIA: Living With, and Without It