Its all about risk when it comes to everything including CV.

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Indeed, DocB. The population - and nearly all media and politicians - are utterly clueless about risk assessment, particularly the difference between relative risk and absolute risk. The absolute risk of dying from this virus stays the same whatever you do in prevention, the relative risk changes with where you work - care home, hospital Covid wards, scaffolder - or live, in the middle of Birmingham or North Uist.

Looking at ourselves, our absolute risk of dying is 100%. Nothing can change that. The relative risk of dying “early” changes with how you live your life - that increases with driving, cycling, scuba diving, smoking and drinking. Or having diabetes.
 
Worked most of my life in the nuclear industry where risk assessment was part of everything you did. The was no such thing as safe or unsafe. Everything you did had a risk and methodologies existed for assigning numerical values of those risks. The trick was then to look at consequences of an action and the more horrendous the consequences, the lower the risk, usually expressed as a probabilty of the occurance happening, was required before the operation would be contemplated.

I remember a colleague whos son had epilepsy and some sort of brain intrusion was proposed. The surgeon told him that the procedure could lead to massive brain damage but only went wrong once in 100 operations and as such was very safe. My mate fell off his chair. You see in his laboratory he would be allowed to do anything where the risk of failure was greater than 1 in a million.
 
That's just reminded me of the conversation my husband and I had with the two Urology surgeons who were going to operate on him to remove his Prostate Cancer, using the relatively new to our hospital Da Vinci Robot. Head Honcho main man who'd pressed for the £250k to be spent on it, said he reckoned the 'failure rate' was less than 1 in 100. I grinned and asked 'So how many ops have you used it for, so far then?' - almost 200 by now was the reply - decided to go for it. Our Hospital now has a dedicated ward for Surgery on Day of Admission cases, where you arrive after Nil by mouth since specified time yesterday, get all the normal obs done, change into surgical gown, sit around and wait to be called through - first was a Thursday and they overran so he escaped, next was following Tuesday where again, they overran A Lot with the chap before him so sent home again - and I immediately said, Great - that will be the one that went wrong in this 100 ops then! so it was actually done two days later, and then they were ruddy well panicking after cos he couldn't pass water, No - cos he's hardly consumed any liquid for over a flippin week and it's warm weather you ruddy well try piddling when the two or three mouthfuls you've allowed him since he came round (which took well over 24 hrs, he's not good with anaesthetics and allergic to morphine, not much better with alternatives) have immediately been absorbed by the dry blotting paper of his innards. Aaargghh. Eventually wee'd on Day 3, then wouldn't let him out cos his BP wouldn't increase from 100/55 Oh what a surprise when it's never been more than that since he was 20-ish and he's had degrees of postural hypotension all his life; always sits down to wee, etc. Try reading his notes for God's sake!
 
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