In one of my first outings since the shutdown, I went to Office Depot to buy office supplies. Yes, I dutifully wore a mask. So did the cashier.
So far, so good.
I asked how he was doing with wearing a mask all day.
“It’s not a problem,” he said. “But I don’t wear a mask anywhere else. I just let people yell at me.”
“You might,” I suggested, “want to rethink that.”
He waved dismissively and I left the store.
“It’s a choice,” the people who don’t wear masks say.
I can only guess that he wears a mask in the store because it is required, and he wants to keep his job. Otherwise, he is like others who have patiently told me that they really don’t “feel a need” to wear a mask.
I see the same thing in HEB when I shop for food. One or two people, of every 10, apparently don’t “feel a need” to wear a mask.
At the far extreme, some people protest that having to wear a mask violates their personal freedom. Apparently, we’ve raised individual freedom to such a high level in America that it trumps any obligations we have as social beings.
A virus is about illness and death, nothing else
Here’s the thing. Covid-19 isn’t about personal freedom. It’s not political. It’s a virus. It’s about illness and death. The best we can do is reduce the risk we present to others. And reduce the risk that others present to us.
Is it inconvenient? Yes. Itchy, sometimes? Yes. But if wearing a mask is what we can do to restart our economy and preserve jobs while preventing further contagion, it’s a small price to pay for a big reduction in risk and a return to work.
You’d think that would be a real no-brainer. But here we are: Given an inch, multitudes have reached for a mile. Since Memorial Day new hospitalizations have turned up, setting new records in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Politicians can carp over the meaning of testing numbers, but no one goes to a hospital for fun. New hospital admissions are hard boots-on-the-ground numbers.
Risks we can’t “see”
It turns out that just as the behavioral economists have discovered that we’re pretty irrational in many of our decisions about money and investing, we also have a problem with making reasonable assessments about life risks. There are risks we simply can’t “see.”
That “we,” by the way, prominently includes journalists. As a group, we love anecdotal reporting. We go for “the story” because it’s visceral.
That’s a problem.
It obscures both the good news about dramatic reductions in the risks of life and the sources of bad news about risks that continue to cause havoc.
In their 1984 book “Risk Watch: The Odds of Life,” doctors John Urquhart and Klaus Heilmann wrote: “To understand risk, you must take a big step beyond the journalistic view to perceive the number of victims in relation to the number of people who did just what the victims were doing but managed to emerge unscathed.”
They point out that if 10 people die in 10 separate car crashes, they will receive little attention. But if 10 people die in a single crash, it’s big news.
In another example, they observe that the crash of a fully loaded 747 aircraft would receive worldwide attention. Yet deaths in the United States attributable to smoking, they say, exceed 500,000 a year. That’s the equivalent of about six fully loaded 737-Max aircraft crashing, every day, week after week. Individual deaths, scattered over hundreds of homes and hospitals, are weak signals lost in the noise of daily living.
In a similar vein, they report that Alex Comfort (best known for his book “The Joy of Sex”) once noted that 40 to 60 percent of the caseload at Los Angeles County Hospital was directly alcohol related. (You can be sure that LA County Hospital isn’t unique.)
How does this blindness happen? Easy. We turn a proverbial “blind eye” toward risks that people volunteer for that are socially acceptable. We also, they write, accept 10 to 100 times the risk for activities we choose over circumstances that are imposed on us.
That is why we shut down the economy to fight Covid-19 but allow cigarettes and beer to be sold at supermarkets, gas stations and convenience stores across the country.
What’s the takeaway here?
Just this: Public health is a big, big deal. But we simply haven’t been able to see it.
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Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels
(c) Scott Burns, 2020