> That's a good metric, but it's not the metric the numbers GP quoted were for. Those numbers were for the metric "probability that you would catch COVID-19 and be hospitalized with it over the past 1.5 years". That's fundamentally something different.
Where did you see that? I looked up GP and didn't find that 1.5 year time anywhere. Furthermore, it makes no sense in the context of GP, where they said:
> > For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated?
> If you said >50%, you would be in good company. It's the most common answer.
I don't believe there is any place on earth where you can poll people and reach an average response of >50% to the question "what is the probability that you would catch covid AND be hospitalized for it over the next 1.5 years, if you don't get the vaccine". Let's think for a moment what that would require: first off, it would require a large proportion of the unvaccinated population to get COVID. Second, a large proportion of those unvaccinated infected people would need to be hospitalized. So basically, it would require a place on earth that doesn't yet have significant natural immunity due to previous infections, and doesn't have anywhere close to herd immunity due to vaccinations, and somehow, a place like that would need to be ravaged by COVID in the future. Furthermore, it would need a strain of COVID that hospitalizes something like 70% of those infected, compared to current strains of COVID, which hospitalize something like 1% of infected (remember, most COVID infections do not cause symptoms and thus are not counted in infected counts).
This scenario is so outlandish it is very very clearly impossible. It's so outlandish that you will not be able to find a population where most people would believe such a scenario. Instead, what GP was likely referring to, was the "risk that you are hospitalized IF you catch COVID" (where, again, people overestimate the risks, but it's less outlandish).