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Does anyone else constantly wish for access to actuarial tables for everything?

What are my chances of getting Lyme disease if I go hiking 6x / month in the summer in CT? How dangerous is a motorcycle vs. bike vs. car?

I need a microcovid.org, but for everything.

What brought this up today is that I’m thinking of signing up for this Lyme disease vaccine trial: clinicaltrials.chasemr.com/adu

is one of the worst states for Lyme infection, but baseline prevalence is still 0.035%.

I’m finding it very difficult to calculate the expected utility of participating in a vaccine trial for Lyme, given that I plan to do a good amount of hiking in CT in the summer, but I’m also good about wearing long pants and using tick spray.

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If anyone’s curious how I landed on this: I signed up to do it because while the incidence of Lyme disease is fairly low in absolute terms, the rate of severe adverse effects from phase 2 trials is also very low.

But it turns out the trial is closing on Monday, so I’d need to get the first shot then, and they want 2 weeks between getting the Lyme vaccine and getting the COVID vaccine — and I’m scheduled to get the first COVID vaccine shot on Monday.

I could put off the COVID vaccine for 2 weeks, but I believe that would have practical downsides for me, and I don’t think that the practical benefits of getting the Lyme vaccine aren’t high enough to overwhelm that.

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@brainwane Time to try and get WMF on board in building some sort of open risk analysis database, as I also suggested here: twitter.com/pganssle/status/13

I feel like it would have to be a major undertaking and I can’t think of anyone other than WMF/Wikipedia who has actually managed to scale something while maintaining a sense of collaboration and openness.

@pganssle @Greg what do you think the chances are for something like this? And do you know whether Lydia or any of those folks are in the Fediverse?

@pganssle
I vaguely remember seeing something like this ages ago, a page calculating or at least presenting data about micromorts. I doubt it would be as comprehensive as you would hope, but I wasn't able to find it again anyway, so that's a moot point.

@pganssle Interesting post but definitely NO in my case! (See Bergman’s The Seventh Seal)

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