Abstract
Fatality risk, in general, is a fraught concept, with many misconceptions about chances of harm rising in contrast to actual harm. Additionally, even in situations where a disease is clearly highly fatal, there are different ways to think about fatality. Is the most dangerous disease the one that is the least likely for a patient to survive, or is the most dangerous disease one that kills the most people? How do phenomena like environmental sanitation and individual risk factors play into this, since differing “preparedness landscapes” may lead to wildly different disease outcomes in a population? The goal of this chapter is to unpack the toll of disease in as statistically minded a manner as possible.