Be my Covid-19 oddsmaker (Toronto)

Post date: 2020-06-29 07:08:27

I'm trying to make some decisions around behaviors during the pandemic. Notably: I'm trying to decide whether to send my kid back to daycare. My personal approach to risk (both my emotional response, and my rational decision-making) is helped a lot my knowing the odds. I realize there are a lot of unknown factors, but I'd love to try and get some ballpark sense of the odds of a number of things happening.

My *guess* is that the odds of anything very bad happening as a result of our kid going to daycare are lower than the regular background risk we all lived with every day pre-pandemic. (Like - we are all more likely to be killed/harmed by some other random thing than killed/harmed by Covid). I'm interested if that is true. For me - that's a really important and useful threshold in decision-making.

I realize a lot around all this is very unknown, but I'm hoping there's a way to get ranges?

Here are some things I'd love to think about:

a) What are, roughly, the odds that our kid would come into contact with someone with Covid while in daycare?
b) What are the odds that our kid would get the virus?
c) What are the odds that our kid would get very sick from it?
d) What are the odds that my partner or I would get the virus?
e) What are the odds that my partner or I would get very sick from it?
f) What are the odds that we would have to do a two-week quarantine?
g) Is there some other eventuality/risk we should be thinking about?

Some probably relevant facts:
- We are in Toronto's little Portugal neighbourhood (M6J 3K9)
- Our kid is 5. I am 52. My wife is 44.
- Our daycare is doing closed groups of 8 kids, two teachers. Handwashing. Temp checking. It is indoors a fair amount of the time.

Note that: In most of my day-to-day decisions about Covid, I think at least as much about my responsibility to society than about my own personal risk. But in this case, I'm inclined to focus more on risks to my family and myself. I'm happy to hear opinions about this.

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