(2021-01-14) How Many Microcovids Would You Spend On A Burrito?
How Many Microcovids Would You Spend on a Burrito? Six nerdy roommates used public health data to create an online Covid-19-risk points system for every activity—and protect their pandemic pod.
they and four friends decided to join forces and move into a beige, hacienda-style townhouse in San Francisco’s Mission District. Their new home, they decided, would strike a better balance. It would be like a bash’—a type of chosen family described in Ada Palmer’s science fiction novel Too Like the Lightning as a radical “haven for discourse.” They named it Ibasho, the Japanese word from which bash’ is derived, which means “a place where you can feel like yourself.”
They were well networked within a larger community of similar group houses around the Bay Area. It was like belonging to a more grown-up version of MIT dorms. Everyone seemed to know everyone from some salon or startup or quirky coding project. The social graph was dense.
Living was simple at first. The government had ordered everyone to stay home, so the housemates stayed home.
Then the world started to open back up. This was accompanied by the reemergence of a thing called “desire.” In its wake came strain. Olsson describes what happened next as the “everyone-needing-exceptions problem.”
They made decisions by consensus, following a detailed agenda with minutes and a time limit, lest the debate wear on too long.
The meetings were growing tiresome, the decisions more contentious.
In the late 1970s, a Stanford engineering professor named Ronald Howard became preoccupied with the risks of life. Every activity, he wrote in a research brief for the US military in 1979, involves hazards
Howard proposed a subunit that he called a micromort: a one-in-a-million chance of death.
biases seem to be hardwired in our brains.
Howard’s answer to such irrationality was “installing a new operating system on your brain,” as he wrote
Olsson wondered if they could find a way to agree on the costs of everything in a more systematic fashion. That way, they could budget their risk until there was a vaccine. It would be a little like counting calories.
Olsson called their risk points microcovids, in a tip of the hat to Howard, and one microcovid equaled a one-in-a-million chance of catching the virus
It was clear from the start that the evidence they were looking for did not exis
But there was another way to approach the exercise. Any situation could be broken down into two parts: the risk that the people around you were infected and the risk that any infected person would give you the virus.
they found the factors that made a situation more or less risky came down to mask quality, ventilation, distance from other people, and—a particular surprise to them—the volume at which people spoke, because loud talking meant spewing more virus. The complication was determining how much weight to give each factor.
The risk assessment tool was really just a Google spreadsheet. Each person had a tab, and they established protocols. The Microcovid creators had allocated each house member 10,000 points for the year, but they had only 3,000 points to spend. Because they lived in a house of six people plus two quasi-live-in partners, just being at home would cost them each about two-thirds of their points
A few weeks later, as the winter surge reached San Francisco, I checked back in. Lives at Ibasho were getting more complicated. The housemates felt they knew how to live, and yet the rising infection rate meant their summer habits were putting them over budget in winter.
There were new questions too, like whether a new variant believed to spread faster would mess with their calculations, and how to figure in the risks of people around them who had received a vaccine.
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