We're all gonna die.
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There's plenty of uncertainty in the world these days, but if there's one thing we can be pretty darn sure of, it's the fact that one day we will cark it.
Before I became a journalist I studied actuarial science which, to simplify, is the study of risk.
The first actuaries worked for life insurance companies, who wanted to know exactly how likely a person will be to die.
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When gazing through the actuarial tables, one conclusion immediately leaps out at you: the chance of dying eventually reaches 100 per cent the longer we live.
The only questions that remain are what's going to kill us and what should we be afraid of?
The answers are not shark attacks, Islamic terrorists or plane crashes, as much as journalists or movie directors would have you believe.
Figures released last week from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that in 2019 the biggest cause of accidental death was falling over.
Falls are the second leading cause of accidental death worldwide according to the World Health Organisation, claiming roughly 646,000 fallen victims each year.
Their website explains it thusly: "A fall is defined as an event which results in a person coming to rest inadvertently on the ground or floor or other lower level."
Spine-chilling stuff.
Other equally mundane risks such as driving, smoking, drinking or being overweight are statistically much more life threatening than snake attacks, murderers or anything worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.
And yet we can see countless examples of governments around the world prioritising these low-risk threats at the expense of the more mundane, but much more likely, ones.
Consider the millions spent on shark nets every year in NSW, or the billions spend on the TSA security theatre at airports.
While these measures may be vote winners, from an actuarial point of view they are a catastrophic waste of money.
Now, let us crunch the numbers and consider the chance of dying from the AstraZeneca vaccine, keeping in mind no causal link has been proved.
The UK's advisory board has said there were 79 cases of blood clotting issues among more than 20 million patients injected with AstraZeneca.
Even if we assume that all 79 cases were causally related (which has not been proven), that's about a 0.000395 per cent chance.
Of those, only 19 died at time of writing, so that puts the chance of death at about 0.000095 per cent.
For reference, that's about 70 per cent as likely as getting killed by an asteroid at some point during your lifetime.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration has decided to continue the roll-out of AstraZeneca despite the one case of blood clotting in Melbourne.
However, on Thursday they decided to follow in the UK's footsteps by offering Pfizer as an AstraZeneca alternative for adults under the age of 50.
The government continues to maintain, however, that both vaccines are statistically safe, and that any "possible risks" are far overshadowed by the risks of COVID itself.
But the risk of death is not the only thing that an actuary needs to factor in. The "quality-adjusted life year" is an attempt to capture the dollar value of a year well-lived.
That might sound like a silly endeavour, but it is at least an attempt to acknowledge that the quality of life matters just as much as the quantity.
We can't live our lives cowering from asteroids, shunning slippery bathrooms, or avoiding potentially shark-infested beaches.
We take on fatal risks all the time because life is meant to be lived, not just prolonged for as long as possible.
The reason I quit actuarial science is because I decided that life is too short to be spent staring at spreadsheets and calculating the risk of death.
The vaccine rollout is not just about saving lives, but also about allowing us to take back our freedoms and live a better quality of life in a post-lockdown world.
I dream of a day when I can embrace my friends and travel the world once more, free from the yoke of COVID restrictions.
For that reason, I am eagerly waiting for my turn to get the vaccine, with all the potential risks that that entails.
When I head to Wagga Base Hospital to get my shot, I shall be comforted knowing I am more likely to die in a car crash on the way there. Either that, or I'll slip in the hospital bathroom and crack my head on the sink.
We should live our lives to the fullest, because no matter how careful we are, in the end we're all gonna die.
- Kenji Sato is a reporter for The Daily Advertiser
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