I’m a professional number-cruncher, and I think it’s unclear.
I believe you mentioned being from Maine? In 2020, there were around 3000 heart disease deaths in Maine; roughly 8 per day.
Traffic deaths in Maine seem to hover around 160 / year, or under 0.5 /day.
So your Covid death rate is around 3/4 the heart disease rate, and 12 times the car crash death rate.
In my view, that’s serious enough to take seriously.
On the other hand, Covid tends to kill older or unvaccinated people. Vaccination reduces mortality by a factor of about 10, and being in the 50 to 65 year old age bracket is about 8 times safer than being over 65. I like the bar graph in this article from March 2022 that explains this pretty well. So that crude number of 8 deaths per day might be more like 0.1 deaths per day in your demographic: 8 ÷ 8 ÷ 10 = 0.1
And on the other other hand, none of the mortality data tells you much about long Covid, which - last I heard - was practically unaffected by immunization status. I’m self-employed in a very thought-intensive job: I can’t have months of brain-fog.
ETA: on still another hand (gonna have a statue of Quon Yin if we keep this up), 6 deaths per day in a population of 1.3 M sounds high to me. All of Australia (pop around 26 M), is running around 3 deaths per day with 20 times the population.
Given all the above, I’m one of those still-masking folks. It’s maybe worth noting that I’m oblivious to fashion so I don’t mind how I look. And I grew up in a place where a cold winter day was -40 C (same as -40 F). You wore a scarf over your face when outside in winter, so because of my childhood memories, feeling my own warm breath on my face means “yay, it’s time to go outside and play!”
