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Walid Nasrallah's avatar

Thank you, THANK YOU, for bringing up micromorts. I learned about them in grad school in the 1990s and taught grad courses on them for 12 years. It's a really helpful abstraction and I'm more dismayed than surprised that no public figure I know, in the press or in government, has brought it up in this context.

One tiny thing to add : just being alive and at a certain age has a micromort value. For me at age 56 my baseline micromort value is 7 per day. For my 20-year-old son it's under 2. When I retire at 67 it will be about 18 and only goes up. So. One really intuitive comparison would be that catching Covid makes my daily micromort value equivalent to that of someone in their 90s. My son catching Covid brings his micromort level up to mine. And that is why he stopped masking earlier than I did.

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Cdub's avatar

Can you please address the recent NYT article that the Pfizer vaccine for 5-12 year olds is not very effective? For those of us with high-risk kiddos, this news feels devastating. Can you talk about how effective the vax really is, why they are removing school mask mandates at the same time as this info coming out, if a booster will be available soon and is advised, and how we should proceed? Thank you - so grateful to you.

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