(2021-08-15) The Delta Variant Has Warped Our Risk Perception

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

Last winter, during a similar moment of rising case numbers, and before widespread vaccination, I wrote about a project called Microcovid, an online tool built by a group of six roommates in San Francisco that calculated the risk of viral exposure

Their common unit of account was a one-in-a-million chance of catching the virus, a “microcovid”—borrowing a concept that Howard called a micromort, or a one-in-a-million chance of death (2021-01-14) How Many Microcovids Would You Spend On A Burrito?

The math is more confusing now, a little harder to intuit

as the Microcovid team explains in their July update, getting vaccinated also means a bigger overall budget, because the risks of death and hospitalization are so much lower. The question is how much bigger should our budgets get?

Setting a baseline budget has always been tricky. It’s important, because all the activity calculations revolve around it, but it is also the least grounded in statistics. “It really is about feelings,” Olsson told me at the time—as personal as it is scientific. For Ibasho, an initial budget of 10,000 microcovids per year was drawn from discussing how they felt about their personal risks and risks to loved ones