Spot on.
So what's more likely to kill a human being:
(i) Going about living life C-virus be damned?
(ii) Boarding a commercial airline flight?
No, not a trick question.
Put another way...
(i) Did you ever take a commercial airline flight any time between 2004 and 2019?
If so, what level of risk did you assign to that activity and how worried were you about perishing in a plane crash?
(ii) Assuming you did fly commercially in that 15-year time frame --- how do you assess the relative risk of going out and living a normal life in 2020 given the "threat" of the C-virus?
Do you believe living a normal life in 2020 puts you at greater risk of perishing from the C-virus than boarding a commercial airline flight in the prior 15-years?
Rastan, I don't know whether you believe you have a trick of definitional or statistical gymnastics up your sleeve. I am hoping the "trick" is rather to talk about the amount of effort we put into aviation safety!
But here are the facts.
In terms of a commercial airlline flight,
in the United States, whole years routinely go by between fatalities in regularly scheduled commercial aviation. Deaths in aviation writ large, i.e., including general aviation, typically are well under 1,000. Here's 2018, the most recent count, where aviation, including the local cropduster or tourist flight, totaled 393 deaths. 1 death was in commercial airline flight. You probably specifically remember this death -- a woman was sucked partially out of a window in mid-air on a SWA flight.
https://ntsb.gov/investigations/dat...a_Stats/US-Transportation-Fatalities-2018.pdf
At present, in the United States, we are at 150,000+ COVID-19 deaths from March-July, a 5-month span.
Globally, since you're talking about what a "human being's" risk is, I believe in 2015 or 2016 we had a fatality-free global airline safety record, but I'm quoting from memory. Suffice it to say, despite significant issues that it's always wrong to sleep on, you're nowhere near even the U.S. total of deaths from COVID-19. (There were huge increases in the global fatality rate in 2018, taking the global toll into the hundreds, due to the Indonesian and I think Kenyan crashes of Boeing 737 Max planes.)
We're at 600,000+ COVID deaths globally.
So yeah, good point if you mean "look at the resources we have always poured into commercial aviation to avoid deaths even in single digits."
If you're trying to do some statistical backflip to get to the conclusion that it's safer to disregard COVID than get on an airplane, let me go make some popcorn
