<
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/06/covid-numbers-outdated-two-doses-six-feet/661366/>
"The past two and a half years have been a global crash course in infection
prevention. They’ve also been a crash course in basic math: Since the arrival
of this coronavirus, people have been asked to count the meters and feet that
separate one nose from the next; they’ve tabulated the days that distance them
from their most recent vaccine dose, calculated the minutes they can spend
unmasked, and added up the hours that have passed since their last negative
test.
What unites many of these numbers is the tendency, especially in the United
States, to pick thresholds and view them as binaries: above this,
mask; below
this,
don’t; after this,
exposed, before this,
safe. But some of the
COVID numbers that have stuck most stubbornly in our brains these past 20-odd
months are now disastrously out of date. The virus has changed; we, its hosts,
have as well. So, too, then, must the playbook that governs our pandemic
strategies. With black-and-white, yes-or-no thinking, “we do ourselves a
disservice,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University, told
me. Binary communication “has been one of the biggest failures of how we’ve
managed the pandemic,” Mónica Feliú-Mójer, of the nonprofit Ciencia Puerto
Rico, told me.
Here, then, are five of the most memorable numerical shorthands we’ve cooked up
for COVID, most of them old, some a bit newer. It’s long past time that we
forget them all."
Via Doug Senko, who wrote: "This is really interesting. How our binary yes/no
COVID advice and recommendations are incredibly simplistic and unrealistic."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
