The Delta Variant Has Warped Our Risk Perception
Your chance of being crushed in bed tonight by a falling satellite is minuscule. It is also nonzero. Ronald Howard, a Stanford engineering professor and founder of a discipline called decision analysis, made a point of noting the latter, the risk of splat.
Perhaps best known for studying questions of dangerous thrills—formal processes, often using statistics, to help you decide whether you really want to jump out of that airplane—Howard made the point that risk is a constant undercurrent in life, whether we think about it or not. Most people sleep soundly with the knowledge of satellites orbiting overhead and cross the street without calculating the odds of a fatal collision. But people don’t blindly fling themselves into traffic, either. Managing the spectrum of life’s risks is a matter of staying safe, but also sane.
Recently, that balance of safe and sane has become more difficult to strike. Choices that had become refreshingly simple and thoughtless early this summer, like entering a grocery store or a bar without a mask, are again more like skydives—relacquered with a layer of viral risk. For me, this realization dawned about three weeks ago, after a series of maskless errands and gatherings—plus a visit to a dance floor or two—when I wondered, would I do the same thing next weekend? Should I? Could I? A few days after I was getting low to a 2002 playlist amid a scrum of sweaty strangers, Los Angeles County reinstated its indoor mask mandate. It was becoming clear that our euphoric reopening had been ill timed, occurring just as the country became acquainted with the highly transmissible Delta variant. Our collective dial had turned too hot, too fast. My inner risk calculator was miscalibrated. Once again I was asking: How much freedom is too much?
