People don’t have enough information yet to perform adequate risk assessment. It’s rational to delay a decision until you have sufficient information to make a reasoned judgement. This is an emergent situation with lots of new, changing, rapidly evolving, sometimes conflicting information in play.
One of the things that is widely known about viruses in general is that some of them can be prevented by vaccination. That is a relatively long standing medical technique that has been applied widely with great success. So it’s not surprising in the face of new and uncertain information people are looking for something proven which confers a degree of certainty- and that’s vaccination.
So people are saying “until we know better, I’m sticking with what I think the gold standard of safety is - a vaccine”.
It’s true that there is risk attached to any action, but usually people have some idea of the level of risk involved (compared to the benefits), and also have the option of taking steps to mitigate those risks.
So for example, in the case of road traffic accidents, people teach their children the Highway Code, accompany them to school, move to areas with less traffic, use crossings and lollipop ladies and campaign for lower speed limits and traffic calming measures near schools.
But Covid-19 is very new. There is emerging new information, sometimes conflicting information about how to slow it, treat it, avoid, who’s susceptible to it. Sometimes that information is supervised by new information. It’s an evolving, sometimes unstable picture. In some aspects, there is not yet enough accurate, reliable information available to understand the disease and it’s risks.
This means that people are unaware in many cases of the level of risk that actually applies to them. And it’s not just that people are unable to make an adequate risk assessment about their health, it’s that this virus is so new that there isn’t enough information available yet to make an adequate risk assessment or take adequate steps to mitigate risk reliably.
It that kind of situation, it’s understandable to position yourself as ultra-low risk taking, because you simply don’t have enough information to make a sound judgement overall.
For example, we’re just starting to discover which health conditions have the biggest impact and why. So at the moment there are some ideas about that, there are some clear directions, but there isn’t an accurate picture yet. So that’s one area of uncertainty.
So some of the conditions that do seem to be relevant are conditions that can undiagnosed for significant periods of time, or can develop over time, for example heart conditions. So maybe seemingly ‘healthy’ people aren’t as healthy as they seem.
OP, you keep asking for links to statistics that would show that people are justified in taking certain stances. But on an emerging situation where there is not yet a stable and trusted pattern of evidence, it is legitimate to err on the side of caution until a stable and trusted pattern of evidence emerges. That hasn’t emerged yet. Robust statistical evidence doesn’t exist yet- either to clearly demonstrate danger or clearly demonstrate safety.
We don’t really know accurately yet how many people in this country have died each day. That’s fairly basic. We’re publishing a figure which is collated together from various sources. The figure published on a particular day isn’t actually “this number of people died yesterday”. It’s “this is the number of deaths recorded yesterday”- there are varying time lags on figures depending on which part of the country is, whether the person died at home or in hospital. Then worldwide, there is confusion about how different countries are recording things, so it’s difficult to it those figures together and start to look for patterns and statistics on a wider scale.
There is also obviously confusion and conflict worldwide on what the best things to do are- for example regarding masks. Advice is being continually revised and updated. In that respect, people often decide not to put too much weight on current advise, in case it changes again. Only a few weeks ago, we were being told that large public gatherings were perfectly safe and unlikely to make an impact.
There are measures we could take as a society which would give people more information- more extensive testing, track and trace etc. This would give people more information and help them form a more accurate picture overall, both of their individual situation and of the overall picture. In this country, we aren’t really taking those steps, which I think adds to people’s mistrust of the situation.
We also don’t have an accurate picture yet about recovery rates, relapse rates, whether immunity is conferred and for how long. So people aren’t yet sure what they are dealing with. Again, that’s a reason to set the bar high on what safe actually is.
It’s also true that the estimation of the probability of extreme events is difficult because of the lack of data: they are events that have not yet happened or have happened only very rarely, so relevant data are scarce. Thus standard statistical methods are generally inapplicable.