A problem, I think, is that covid can't be approached via normal personal risk assessments; you have to go on the assumption that you are 100% going to get it (if you leave the house) because *someone* is.

Let me ramblingly explain.

We're at 10,000 cases a day here in Texas. I called my Dad, worried, when we were at 1,000 cases a day. Several weeks ago.

"Well, you can't let it affect how you live," he told me at the time. "There's so many people in Texas that 1,000 is a miniscule number. It won't be YOU."

The problem, though, is that this lottery of "it won't be YOU" works when we're talking about a fixed rate daily occurrence. Let's say 100 people die in Texas in a car crash every day. It won't be YOU, so you continue to go out.

Covid isn't a fixed rate. It's exponential.

So 1,000 cases became 10,000 cases because each case spawned more cases in a way that something like, say, car crashes won't do.

"Well," he'd say if I were still bothering to talk to him, ",10,000 cases a day in a state the size of Texas is still nothing. It won't be YOU."

Mmhmm. What about when it's 100,000 cases a day? When does my luck magically run out here?

If people keep going out because "it won't be ME", a lot of them are going to be wrong immediately (10,000 a day, at the moment) and a lot of them are going to be wrong eventually (current projections are that the entire state is 60-80% infected by mid-September).

And we come to the fact that individual risk assessments don't work in a pandemic because this thing grows exponentially with each person it infects.