What if your government threatens you with infecting you?

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^Your boyfriend's aunt sounds like an amazing person with a positive attitude! I'm so glad she was so mildly affected and recovered.

Yes it's not a black-and-white thing with diseases. You hear of lifelong heavy smokers who live into their 90s and never so much as develop a cough, and occasionally a child has died of Covid-19. The problem is being able to predict in advance what will happen to a given person, and for that we only have the statistics.

The WHO used to say that face masks barely did any good with Covid-19, and they warned that wearing them could do more harm than good if the user didn't understand the risks (false sense of security leading to people taking silly risks for example). Boris Johnson then said he wanted everybody wearing masks, "to give them the confidence to return to work" as he put it. I figured there was something very dodgy about his reasoning. Then the WHO changed its mind, though we never got a very detailed explanation of why. Then suddenly there's a law enforcing masks. I'm not saying we shouldn't wear masks, just that the information and rules we get foisted on us seem to leave a lot to be desired, and I can't blame people for being skeptical.

Still seems you don't know what exponential means. It's not 'not much more'.

Also, as you seem so afraid of noro but not covid, here are the stats:

Total cases 27.6M Deaths 898K

685 million cases per year Deaths 200,000 per year

I assume you know which is far more deadly.

Statistics can be misleading. I feel your fear of the virus is out of proportion to the facts. most people will be safe and not contract Covid if they follow basic precautions such as sanitization with an alcohol based gel or spray, and frequent hand washing.

There's a risk involved in any activity - from getting run over by a speeding out of control vehicle, killed by a maniacal mass murderer or even just collapsing from heart trouble.

Of course we try to minimize all those risks, but you won't find an 100% of people 100% safe from those events. Key is to face the small possibility of contracting this or any other disease by using basic safety precautions in the same way you have to face them from being on the road.

Oh dear, I think I've opened a can of worms here....

OK, I'll admit it, I am not very math savvy. But I do know that words like "big" and "small" can be subjective. So in a world population of about 7.8 billion, "not much more than a million" doesn't mean 1 million plus 50. It can mean 700 million.

That's what I was trying to say. I used to think that 7.8 billion wasn't that much of a big number, as I always thought there was like a trillion people on Earth, or at least hundreds of billions. But I've learnt how HUGE 7.8 billion really is for a population on a planet the size of Earth. It's such a vast amount of people, that it even makes a few hundred millions look tiny.
And I didn't mean each year, I just meant this year whilst we wait rather impatiently for this magical vaccine.

Maybe I'm really just thinking "hurry the f**k up and find a vaccine or some other cure so that we can carry on with our lives properly".

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus ... cells.html (but noooo, it's nooot at all dangerous...)