A COVID-19 Risk Budget

Wired had an article about a group of risk experts and data specialists who set up a pandemic risk budget for themselves. Or, “Six nerdy roommates used public health data to create an online Covid-risk points system for every activity—and protect their pandemic pod.”

The point was to protect their group house because the actions of one person affected all six of them. (Just like any home with more than one person.)

Living was simple at first. The government had ordered everyone to stay home, so the housemates stayed home … Then the world started to open back up. This was accompanied by the reemergence of a thing called “desire.” In its wake came strain. Olsson describes what happened next as the “everyone-needing-exceptions problem.”

Sound familiar?

Because everyone had a different comfort zone with taking risk, they returned to the concept of the micromort and the contact budget. Everyone got the same budget (a yearly budget broken into weekly amounts). How they chose to spend their risk time was their choice, but each activity had a cost. Some activities were over budget—such as hanging out at a party without a mask—and some used very little budget (walking a dog). But everything used some budget. Once your budget was gone, you stayed at home. They worked to “develop a system for weighing and budgeting viral risk. Olsson called their risk points microcovids, in a tip of the hat to Howard, and one microcovid equaled a one-in-a-million chance of catching the virus.”

Because they were working with a budget, they thought about ways to lessen risk so they spent fewer risk points on activities they didn’t really love doing—such as grocery shopping—and found ways to see people they wanted to see. Calculating risk and making decisions became as easy and automatic as putting on your shoes before leaving the house.

And now they’ve opened up their tool for anyone to use.

While we’re not counting activities because we don’t leave the house often enough or see anyone beyond my parents from afar (and always outdoors), the tool gave us ideas for lessening risk even more. It’s brilliant, so I’m passing it along to you, too.