Risks

 It is commonplace lately, to compare risks from heart disease or traffic hazards to risks from infectious disease as if individual infection risks could be evaluated in-themselves; but some risks are fundamentally collective, not individual. Encouraging people to think in terms of comparisons in personal terms--as New York Times' reporter Benjamin Mueller does in an April 17th column or Dr. Jetelina the epidemiologist he cites does--is wrong in two ways.

First, for Sars Cov2, because peak infectiousness occurs before symptoms appear, risk is shared locally with others in proportion to personal risk taking. That is, a risk taking person is unavoidably putting others at risk.

Second, collective risk taking keeps the virus in play, mutating and infecting in waves, perpetuating the shared hazard. It isn't just wrong to compare individual and collective risk, but to compare present risk with risk that has future effects.

So... what could be easier risk mitigation than wearing an N-95 mask while shopping or pulling it up when close enough to breathe someone's lingering exhalations when outdoors in public spaces. Periodic mask wearing is easier than putting on outdoor clothes or even just outdoor shoes.

But...I know, I know; some people are so pleased with the feeling of superiority they get from believing contrarian myths, that consideration of both individual and collective infection risks are a sign of weakness, the foolish fears of liberal snowflakes; and there is an epidemiologically overwhelming number of those contrarian's among us. Besides, colds and flu (and soon also Covid) are 'natural' hazards, just part of everyday life, aren't they, so why worry?

Well, just as we once worried enough about water-borne disease to take collective public measures, build sanitary infrastructure, and avoid individual risks (drinking directly from lakes or streams for instance), in our intensely interconnected billions-peopled world we will also learn how to prevent air-borne disease or continue to disable and kill millions of people needlessly every year.