(2020-09-01) Webb Risk Micromorts Microcovids And Skydiving

Matt Webb: Risk: micromorts, microCOVIDs, and skydiving. I find these kind of calculators useful to educate my intuition.

Back in May, I was speculating about realtime, hyperlocal pandemic forecasts

this microCOVID calculator is the foundation of this. If you could automatically plug in realtime regional prevalence figures, you’d be able to make a risk assessment like short journey on the bus vs slow journey walking.

The framing of the microCOVID project gives me pause: it’s about personal risk.

But there are three distinct reasons why I follow the government lockdown advice:

society a.k.a. public health – we beat this pandemic through collective action, by bringing down Re, the effective reproduction number.

Re isn’t a measure of prevalence. It’s a measure of how easily the virus spreads. It spreads more easily when people are meeting lots of other people without masks; it spreads less easily when social contact is reduced.

If Re is below 1, prevalence decreases; above 1, and it goes up.

I think of society as a whole having an Re budget

Is there a translation between microCOVIDs and Re? I don’t know.