You're not an epidemiologist, but you feel free to play one on the Internet.
No I don't. I just observe what's going on in the real world and adjust my thinking accordingly, which is something that epidemiologists seem to be too stubborn to do.
First,
absolutely not, and not even close for
total annual driving much less a single road trip.
How does the total number of cases (or deaths) speak to my statement that "most people's risk of dying from this virus if they become infected is minuscule"?
Without demographic data regarding those who've actually died, it does not. If you look at the demographic data, you'll find that almost everyone whose death has been attributed to this virus was A) quite old and B) had at least one, and usually more than one underlying condition ("comorbidity"). Deaths among younger healthy people are indeed exceedingly rare.
And I'll stick with the same reply: pray tell, how exactly does one go about that?
Tell me how my grandparents should protect themselves. They don't leave the house, they really can't alone anymore. They have a person who comes by a couple times a week to help them with cooking and cleaning and otherwise keeps them out of a nursing home. Hardworking upstanding person of good character who does her best to be careful, but who does she interact with? [...]
So you want to prevent everyone in the entire land from living a normal life in attempt to protect your (presumably rather elderly) grandparents?
Going about one's life in a normal way is
not the same as doing a mag-dump into the side of someones house!
My wife has elderly parents too. Her father is 86 or 87, and her mother is about five years younger. Her father has had (and has beaten) two different kinds of cancer. Her mother is mildly diabetic and has blood pressure issues. If either of them come down with a symptomatic case of this thing, their prognosis probably won't be good. Yet they don't think everyone and everything else should come to a halt to protect them. They understand it's on them to protect themselves.
We've always had people who are at high risk of dying from catching just about any bug that's going around. The very old and infirm for one (just look at the normal seasonal changes in death rate), and the immune-compromised, whether it's from a disease such as HIV or from something like chemotherapy. But we don't shut down the country in order keep bugs that are of negligible risk to healthy people from getting to them. We've always had the understanding that it's up to those who are at risk (and/or their care-givers, if they have them) to keep them from catching things.
Given the data on who is actually at risk of dying from this virus, it should be treated no differently. It isn't Ebola or Marburg; it isn't even the Spanish Flu of 100 years ago.
