Benjamin Mueller in the New York Times: “We’re doing a really terrible job of communicating risk,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “I think that’s also why people are throwing their hands up in the air and saying, ‘Screw it.’ They’re desperate for some sort of guidance.”
To fill that void, scientists are thinking anew about how to discuss Covid risks. Some have studied when people could unmask indoors if the goal was not only to keep hospitals from being overrun but also to protect immunocompromised people.
Others are working on tools to compare infection risks to the dangers of a wide range of activities, finding, for instance, that an average unvaccinated person 65 and older is roughly as likely to die from an Omicron infection as someone is to die from using heroin for a year-and-a-half. More here.
Dr. Eli David says, “Future historians will look at the years 2020–2022 with bewilderment. Countless PhDs in history will be earned by analyzing the covid paradox. They will read in historical records that there was a terrible pandemic for two years, but they won’t find any evidence of it in data.”
