Life is all about taking risks when you get right down to it: your first steps as a toddler, your first day of school and so on to starting a family, launching a business or contemplating cancer treatment. Calculating risk versus reward is a mostly automatic process that takes place in the brain and the gut.
We all have individual perceptions of risk that may or may not make sense. I’m okay with riding in an airplane that’s catapulted from an aircraft carrier but you’re not getting me on a motorcycle.
It’s not just risking life and limb. When I left the active-duty Navy for a corporate job, my military-brat wife was momentarily apprehensive because this was the first time in her life that the person who bought her groceries could be fired. (She got over it and took the risk of starting her own counseling practice years later.)
Aversion to risk can stunt lives. I stutter, and that was a problem until I learned to take risks with my speech instead of avoiding speaking for fear of being embarrassed. This is a big issue for people who stutter: I’ve encountered many stutterers who have allowed their fear of speaking to dictate their careers and social life.
During the past year, our society’s response to the Covid pandemic seriously messed with our perceptions of risk. The virus was new, unknown and scary. It did not help that the news media served up a steady diet of pandemic porn, scientific discussion was censored and politicians of all stripes behaved badly.
The result was a tangle of contradictions, such as the odd pronouncements from public health officials that Black Lives Matter demonstrations were okay but outdoor church services were superspreaders. And fully-vaccinated politicians pleaded with everyone to get the shot but signaled their own distrust of the vaccine by continuing to wear masks themselves.
We rely on elected officials to balance risks and benefits, and watched varying perceptions of risk drive public policy. It turned out that some states that imposed draconian lockdowns suffered severe economic and public health consequences but still had higher Covid death rates. Yet states that reopened quickly amid dire predictions from the “experts” often fared better. It’s tempting to conclude that: a) Our leaders may not know what they’re doing; and b) Lots of people are trying to scare us.
So we’ve been pretty much on our own in deciding how frightened to be, calculating our own risk and figuring out how to behave.
Because the virus is most deadly to my age group I wore gloves and wiped down food packages in the initial weeks of the pandemic, wore a mask and mostly stayed home (easy enough for a retiree). Getting vaccinated reduced my risk of serious illness from Covid by at least 94%, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Since I’m in excellent health, those odds were good enough for me to gradually resume normal socializing (mostly with other vaccinated seniors) as infection and hospitalization rates declined.
Other folks will have different perceptions of risk, of course. I wonder how many people wore masks while jaywalking across busy streets.
As the pandemic winds down it’s been interesting to watch people figure things out. Late last month I attended a chamber concert at which masks were optional but the audience — geriatric and presumably vaccinated — virtually all wore masks. Last week I went to the same concert and found the same crowd unmasked. Did they feel safer than they did a few weeks earlier? Or less concerned about being mistaken for Republicans?
Some people can tolerate less risk than others and I can’t blame anyone for erring on the side of caution. One surprise the pandemic revealed is that educators, as a group, appear to be more risk-averse than the rest of us. Despite overwhelming evidence that children rarely catch or transmit the virus and healthy teachers are at less risk than retail workers, educators were genuinely afraid to return to the classroom even after they jumped the line for the vaccine. Which raises a question: Are these the people we want teaching children to evaluate information and make rational decisions?
It’s hard to tell what long-term impact the pandemic will have. A recent poll found that 50% of those surveyed believe Covid has permanently changed the way we live in the U.S. Because government officials are quick to impose restrictions and slow to remove them, it’s a good bet that some Covid rules may remain in place for at least as long as we’ve been taking our shoes off at the airport.
Trust in institutions was declining even before our elected leaders, public health experts and news media fumbled the response to Covid. How will Americans react to the long-term extension of this pandemic or the beginning of the next one? Will everyone continue to obey the authorities, or will more people thumb their noses at them?
I suspect the country is as divided on risk tolerance as we are on practically everything else. So some of us will demand that our leaders create an environment of zero risk regardless of the economic and human cost. Others will challenge them to weigh risks and benefits to make reasonable tradeoffs for the greater good.
I’m going to keep a mask handy just to be on the safe side. And in case they change the rules again.
Risk in a time of pandemic
Life is all about taking risks when you get right down to it: your first steps as a toddler, your first day of school and so on to starting a family, launching a business or contemplating cancer treatment. Calculating risk versus reward is a mostly automatic process that takes place in the brain and the gut.
We all have individual perceptions of risk that may or may not make sense. I’m okay with riding in an airplane that’s catapulted from an aircraft carrier but you’re not getting me on a motorcycle.
It’s not just risking life and limb. When I left the active-duty Navy for a corporate job, my military-brat wife was momentarily apprehensive because this was the first time in her life that the person who bought her groceries could be fired. (She got over it and took the risk of starting her own counseling practice years later.)
Aversion to risk can stunt lives. I stutter, and that was a problem until I learned to take risks with my speech instead of avoiding speaking for fear of being embarrassed. This is a big issue for people who stutter: I’ve encountered many stutterers who have allowed their fear of speaking to dictate their careers and social life.
During the past year, our society’s response to the Covid pandemic seriously messed with our perceptions of risk. The virus was new, unknown and scary. It did not help that the news media served up a steady diet of pandemic porn, scientific discussion was censored and politicians of all stripes behaved badly.
The result was a tangle of contradictions, such as the odd pronouncements from public health officials that Black Lives Matter demonstrations were okay but outdoor church services were superspreaders. And fully-vaccinated politicians pleaded with everyone to get the shot but signaled their own distrust of the vaccine by continuing to wear masks themselves.
We rely on elected officials to balance risks and benefits, and watched varying perceptions of risk drive public policy. It turned out that some states that imposed draconian lockdowns suffered severe economic and public health consequences but still had higher Covid death rates. Yet states that reopened quickly amid dire predictions from the “experts” often fared better. It’s tempting to conclude that: a) Our leaders may not know what they’re doing; and b) Lots of people are trying to scare us.
So we’ve been pretty much on our own in deciding how frightened to be, calculating our own risk and figuring out how to behave.
Because the virus is most deadly to my age group I wore gloves and wiped down food packages in the initial weeks of the pandemic, wore a mask and mostly stayed home (easy enough for a retiree). Getting vaccinated reduced my risk of serious illness from Covid by at least 94%, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Since I’m in excellent health, those odds were good enough for me to gradually resume normal socializing (mostly with other vaccinated seniors) as infection and hospitalization rates declined.
Other folks will have different perceptions of risk, of course. I wonder how many people wore masks while jaywalking across busy streets.
As the pandemic winds down it’s been interesting to watch people figure things out. Late last month I attended a chamber concert at which masks were optional but the audience — geriatric and presumably vaccinated — virtually all wore masks. Last week I went to the same concert and found the same crowd unmasked. Did they feel safer than they did a few weeks earlier? Or less concerned about being mistaken for Republicans?
Some people can tolerate less risk than others and I can’t blame anyone for erring on the side of caution. One surprise the pandemic revealed is that educators, as a group, appear to be more risk-averse than the rest of us. Despite overwhelming evidence that children rarely catch or transmit the virus and healthy teachers are at less risk than retail workers, educators were genuinely afraid to return to the classroom even after they jumped the line for the vaccine. Which raises a question: Are these the people we want teaching children to evaluate information and make rational decisions?
It’s hard to tell what long-term impact the pandemic will have. A recent poll found that 50% of those surveyed believe Covid has permanently changed the way we live in the U.S. Because government officials are quick to impose restrictions and slow to remove them, it’s a good bet that some Covid rules may remain in place for at least as long as we’ve been taking our shoes off at the airport.
Trust in institutions was declining even before our elected leaders, public health experts and news media fumbled the response to Covid. How will Americans react to the long-term extension of this pandemic or the beginning of the next one? Will everyone continue to obey the authorities, or will more people thumb their noses at them?
I suspect the country is as divided on risk tolerance as we are on practically everything else. So some of us will demand that our leaders create an environment of zero risk regardless of the economic and human cost. Others will challenge them to weigh risks and benefits to make reasonable tradeoffs for the greater good.
I’m going to keep a mask handy just to be on the safe side. And in case they change the rules again.
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