Skydiving for COVID-19

I'm a numbers guy, and always have been. One of the things I learned to do while writing statistical software for Wall St banks is compare statistics to each other to get a better idea of the scale of things. For example, what the US spends on defense is almost exactly our trade deficit. There's no cause and effect there, but it helps one understand the relative scale of these two things.

Skydiving, or bungee jumping, which have about the same risk, gives you 6 chances in a million of dying per jump. So what about COVID-19?

Looking at COVID-19 deaths in the US it struck me that my state, California, which has so far experienced 95 deaths per million people is much better (by no means the best) than NY, NJ, CT, RI which are well over 1,000 chances per million, AKA greater than 1/1000 chance you've already died, and we're only 4 months into this. So what about the future?

I ask this because the USN's "death ship" aircraft carrier has been reporting sailors who had COVID-19 have gotten it again, and this is also being reported by China and European countries. This means NO "Herd Immunity". Like the common cold, the flu, SARs, etc, there's no vaccine because the virus keeps mutating, rendering last year's vaccine useless.

We've already lost more dead to COVID-19 than the Vietnam War, WW-I, Korea and all but WW-II and the US Civil War, but again, we're only 4 months into this. I love liberty as much or more as any other American, but given the risk, and thinking about projecting this out 10, 20, 50, 100 years, we're being complete idiots in managing this risk. If I can trade a loss of privacy for another 20yrs of life, I'm in. Privacy loss is a theoretical threat. COVID-19 is real, present, and urgent.

Lets assume the virus doesn't mutate to make a vaccine useless, as this might happen. We might get lucky. Lets assume it takes 24 months to get a vaccine, so 6X as long as we've been fighting this battle so far. In "bad" places like NY, NJ we're running at a rate of 300 per million people per month, so in 24 months, 7,200 per million. That's more than 1,000 TIMES as deadly as sky-diving.

Assuming people can develop an immunity to COVID-19, but to do so everyone would have to get infected, we'd lose 6% of 350 million people, so 21 MILLION people. That's more than the ENTIRE population of New York.

We have no assurance that a vaccine is even possible. We have no idea what 'Herd Immunity" means for a mortality rate going forward. Other than social distancing, N-95 masks, improving ER techniques, bleach, alcohol, and anti-bacterial soap, most of which have been employed while the current statistics formed, we're pretty much defenseless.

The really bracing fact is, if we stay in the conditions we've been in for the last 4 months, COVID-19 over time will kill a large percentage of humanity. We won't be a planet of 8 billion people, we'll be a planet of 1 billion, or maybe less. With stone-age transportation, The Plague killed 60% of Europe's population. Given Earth's current population, that's almost 5 BILLION dead - and that's assuming stone-age transportation.

Think about it. Our response to date has been absurdly caviler.