Learning to live with Coronavirus

Physician and famed author Michael Crichton reminds us that viruses are as much a part of the natural world as we are and their behavior is equally subject to the laws of uncertainty.

“If viruses are indeed part of the natural world then, we cannot understand them and we cannot predict their behavior….Interacting with viruses , we are denied certainty”, and left to learning to live with them.”

This is the state in which we find ourselves as we attempt to manage the coronavirus. “we are denied certainty”, and left to learning to live” with it.

Luckily we have the work of Pradeep Mutalik, medical research scientist at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics, available to consult while confronting the uncertainty of the coronavirus. According to Mutalik;

“we have to reason with limited knowledge in the face of uncertainty, find reliable sources, exercise a healthy skepticism of the data and make reasonable, principled extrapolations for specific information we may not have. There are no perfect answers, but it is critically important not to be too wrong.”

The micromort, invented by the Stanford scientist Ronald Howard, is a one-in-a-million chance of death. It’s approximately the risk of unnatural death that a person living in the U.S. assumes every single day. According to Mutalik following are approximate risk levels associated with various activities.

• Skiing: ~1 micromort
• Skydiving: 6–7 micromorts