Each of us has a level of risk that we’re comfortable with.

Whether or not
we decide to do something comes down to a pretty simple multiplication
problem, which we all do subconsciously throughout every day. It is:

(How terrible would it feel if a bad result happened from my doing this
thing, a.k.a. the Terrible Factor) x (How likely is it that a bad result will
happen from my doing this thing, a.k.a. the Perceived Likelihood)

(I just made up both those names.)

For example, if I ordered an ice cream and it turned out to be poison and
it killed me, that would be extremely bad. (High Terrible Factor!)
However, that is also extremely unlikely to occur. (Low Perceived
Likelihood!) Therefore, I keep ordering ice cream.

Highly unlikely to be poison.

When people don’t see eye-to-eye on how risky a given behavior is,
it’s because they’re not multiplying the same numbers as one
another.
For example, some people are afraid to fly in planes, and many people
aren’t. I would venture that pretty much all of them are in agreement
about how bad it would be if their plane crashed. On a Terrible Factor
scale from 1 (basically fine) to 100 (literally the worst thing that could
possibly happen to you), I think we can all concede that your plane
plummeting out of the sky is pretty damn close to 100.

Where these two types of people differ is in how likely they think that

result is. I just googled it, and apparently your odds of dying in a plane
crash are one in eleven million, or 0.0000009%. Multiply 0.0000009%
(Perceived Likelihood) by 100 (Terrible Factor), and you get .00000909,
which is well below most of our risk thresholds, which is why most of us
are fine to fly.

But it doesn’t matter what the actual odds of dying in a plane crash are.

All that matters is how likely it feels to you, the person who is deciding
whether or not to step on that plane. (Thus, Perceived Likelihood.)

To people with a plane phobia, their Perceived Likelihood of dying in a

plane crash feel much higher than 0.0000009%. Maybe it feels to them
like 10%. And 10% of 100 is 10, which is beyond the risk threshold that
most of us are willing to accept.
Nobody wants to fall from here.

This doesn’t make these plane-phobics “illogical.” We are all operating

off our feelings when we make risk decisions. I did not know that my
odds of dying in a plane crash were one in eleven million until I googled
it just now, and I still don’t actually know if that’s true. Most of us fly —
or drive, or ride bikes, or swim, or ski — without ever looking at any
actual statistics of how likely these actions are to harm us. We have
a feeling for how risky they are, and that feeling is what guides us.

The point: People’s individual perception of risk varies, and it has

very little to do with the actual risk.

Now let’s take that other number: How terrible would it be if this thing
were to happen? People can differ wildly in their estimation of this, too.
Not everything is the agreed-upon perfect 100 of falling out of a plane.

For example, when I was a kid, I was terrified of getting a cavity because
I hated going to the dentist. Now, of course most people don’t like going
the dentist. But I really, really hated it. And as such, I was
really, really afraid of getting a cavity. Maybe other people would rate a
cavity as a 5 on our 1–100 Terrible Scale. And if they thought they had a
50% chance of getting a cavity, that gives them a risk score of 2.5, which
they could handle.

Me, on the other hand? I knew getting a cavity wasn’t a 100 — I

understood it wasn’t going to kill me — but it was going to make me
miserable. Maybe it was a 30, for me. So if I had that same 50% chance
of getting a cavity as everyone else, that gave me a risk score of 15,
which was way more than I was willing to take on.
Thus, my fear. I brushed my teeth after every meal and snack time. I got
panicked if I had food at a friend’s house and I didn’t have a toothbrush
with me. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, or would make myself sick to my
stomach, thinking about how someday within the next six months I
would have to go to the dentist.

I did everything in my power to lower my chances of getting a cavity.

Because I wasn’t able to lower how terrible it would be if it happened.
This was my literal nightmare.

(Incidentally, I am no longer scared of going to the dentist, and that’s

because a cavity isn’t a 30 for me anymore. I outgrew it. This can be true
for many kids’ phobias. Vomiting can seem really terrible, most horrible
experience I can imagine when you’re a kid, and then you grow into
seeing it as just pretty bad as you mature.)

The point: When people imagine a negative result happening to them,

they differ in imagining just how extreme or unendurable that result
would be.

So what does all this have to do with Covid?

We, as humanity, are categorically incapable of getting on the same page
about a) how likely it is that we each will get Covid and b) how terrible it
would be for us each to get Covid.

This is nothing new: again, we are frequently not on the same page when

it comes to risk assessment. But in this case, because it is an infectious
disease, the risk for each individual is tied up in what sort of risks
everyone else in society takes. And therefore we are often enraged when
other people come up with a different risk score than we do.

My partner and I have rarely seen eye-to-eye on Covid risk in this past
year and a half. We both agree that Covid is real and serious and has
killed millions of people. (Honestly, it seems like I shouldn’t even have
to say that, but in this world, nothing is a given.) But we disagree about
how likely various actions are to get us infected with Covid.

Last summer, I thought that going into stores and being unmasked
outdoors would have a very small chance of giving us Covid. My partner
thought the probabilities were higher than I did. Thus, even though we
agreed that Covid was, let’s say, 50 on the Terrible Scale, we still did not
always agree on what were and were not acceptable risk behaviors.

Now that we are vaccinated, both of the numbers that I’m multiplying are
lower than they were last year. Given that Covid seems to be more mild
and short-term in vaccinated folks, it no longer feels like it would be a 50
if it happened to me. Maybe it would be a 10, which is around where I’d
put an ordinary cold or mild case of the flu. And, now that I’m
vaccinated, I am also less likely to contract Covid from, say, going to a
concert. If my Perceived Likelihood used to feel like 15%, it now feels
more like 3%. So my entire risk score is lower than it was last year.
I would take this risk.

My partner seems to agree that the Terrible Factor now is lower, maybe
also around a 10. But his Perceived Likelihood now is much higher than
mine is. We’ve both heard of many people we know contracting
breakthrough cases. We both know that breakthrough cases could happen
to us, too. But I think it’s less likely than he does, and therefore at this
stage I am more willing to take on certain risky behaviors (e.g. indoor
dining) than he is.

I say “at this stage” because the risk factors keep changing, and humans,
by and large, are pretty bad at re-assessing risk. We tend to develop a
heuristic and stick with it. For example, we stick with “It feels safe to be
in a car provided that I can wear a seatbelt, there’s a carseat for my child,
and the driver has had fewer than two drinks,” rather than going through
the entire decision-making process every single time we are about to get
in a car.

When I asked him to read a draft of this essay, to make sure he was okay
with how he was being depicted, my partner had an interesting response.
“I know it’s safer for me to take some risks now than it was before I was
vaccinated,” he said. “At the same time, as the case count is rising again,
it feels easiest and safest to just return to the patterns of behavior that
served me well before I was vaccinated.” In other words, he did this risk
assessment last year, and he’s probably not going to update it now.
How can I convince someone to come up with the
same risk score that I have?
I do not know. Lord knows both my partner and I have tried plenty over
the past year and a half. I long ago lost track of the number of news
stories and statistics we brought to each other, to try to get the other to
multiply the same numbers. It’s never fully worked, and our numbers
started out much closer than a lot of Americans’.

This question (why won’t you perceive the same risk that I do?) is at the
crux of so much about how we fight or even discuss this virus. If
someone feels that her Perceived Likelihood of getting Covid is pretty
much the same whether or not she’s been vaccinated, then how do you
motivate her to get vaccinated? If someone feels that, for him personally,
as a fit young adult, getting Covid would only have a Terrible Factor of
2, then how do you convince him to stay home or mask up?

Part of that question is also: How do we determine our individual

Terrible Factor for Covid? For many of us, it’s a combination of “how
much would I suffer if I got sick” and also “how much
would other people suffer if I got them sick.” This is why many fit young
adults do choose to take precautions: While they believe they’d be fine if
they got Covid, they also know that they could transmit Covid to the
elderly, immunocompromised, or unvaccinated, and so for them the
Terrible Factor is much higher.
How much responsibility do you feel to protect others in society? This is
one of the fundamental human questions, and Covid has brought it to the
fore. By and large, we prioritize ourselves over others, and we prioritize
people we know and care about over strangers. That’s okay; it’s the built-
in limitations of empathy. If I stub my toe, I know how much it hurts. If a
random lady at the post office stubs her toe, I can imagine that it hurts
her as much as it would hurt me, but I don’t really know that. Therefore,
I’m far more inclined to not stub my own toe than I am to ensure that
Random Lady doesn’t stub hers.

So, in short, how much does the potential suffering of others — many of
them strangers — increase your individual Terrible Factor for Covid? If
someone is operating with a low Terrible Factor, can you get them to
raise it by making them more aware of their role in society?

To convince people to multiply the same numbers and come up with the
same risk score, it would help to know where they got their numbers
from in the first place. Unfortunately, few people can give you a good
answer to that question, since our attitudes are often formed
subconsciously, and we are not even aware of ourselves as having
“numbers” in the first place.

But you don’t have to be able to quantify it to know how you feel. You
can have this conversation with anybody to get a sense of where they
stand on those two factors. Rather than assuming that you know why they
aren’t treating Covid with the exact same level of seriousness that you
are, ask them these two questions: “How likely do you think it is that
you’ll get Covid?” and, “How bad do you think it would be if you got
Covid?”

If their answers are, “Pretty unlikely; I have a strong immune system,”

and, “If I got it, it would probably be fine; I have friends who got Covid
and it was no worse than a cold” — well, now you know what sort of risk
score they are starting from, and how they got there.

Getting people to reevaluate their positions on these things is hard. You

probably know this from the last time somebody tried to get you to
change your mind. Presumably there have been many points over the
past year and a half where people have tried to convince you that you
were too cautious, or not cautious enough. Where they told you that your
chances of contracting Covid are higher or lower than you think they are,
and that getting Covid would probably be much worse or much better
than you’re imagining. Did any of those people convince you?

Most of the time, the answer is probably no. “But that’s because my risk
score is correct,” you’re thinking.

Everybody believes their risk score is correct.

If you can find a way to respect other people’s risk scores as much as you
think they should respect yours — if you can accept that they believe
their scores are right just as fervently as you believe yours is right —
then conversations about what counts as responsible risk behavior are
more likely to be productive.
I consistently find other people’s risk tolerances baffling when they are
not the same as mine. I do not understand people who bike without
helmets or drive without seatbelts. Those things could kill you, and you
could take such simple steps to make them less likely to do so. Why
would you not?!

But when I find myself judging such people (which is usually my

unchecked default position), I try to step back and remind myself that
they’re not dumb or irrational. They’re just multiplying different
numbers. That’s all.