The Dizzying Chaos of Calculating Your Covid Risk

In lieu of coherent public guidelines, most of us resort to incoherent private rules

A Thanksgiving traveler at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA. Photo: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Riding the New York City subway recently, I noticed that just about every advertisement — at least all the ones directly in my sightline — seemed to be public service messages about Covid-19 safety. There were cartoon graphics showing how to properly wear a mask. There were earnest invocations to wash your hands, get tested, stop the spread, flatten the curve — if not for yourself, do it for your vulnerable loved ones. As I took it all in, I was hit with a wave of déjà vu. Back in the 1990s, during the AIDS crisis, the subway PSAs were heavy on ads about safer sex. Instead of masks, the messaging was about condoms. Instead of social distancing, it was monogamy, if not celibacy. Instead of being afraid of aerosol droplets and fomites, we were afraid of certain bodily fluids.

These weren’t just advisories but a kind of moral decree: If you were a good and ethical person who cared about your own health and the health of others (not to mention if you were sufficiently unhomophobic to care about a disease that was overwhelmingly killing gay men) you’d either abstain from sex or use condoms during every single encounter. If you were selfish and terrible, you continued to party like it was 1979.

We’ve Reached the Pandemic’s Point of No Return

Since human behavior falls along a spectrum of good/ethical and selfish/terrible, most people responded with half measures. In my community of mostly not-terribly-at-risk twenty and thirty-somethings, we were usually just as self-serving as we were scared. Again and again, I observed the same patterns. People would use condoms at the beginning of a new relationship, but discard them at some arbitrarily defined point, sometimes after getting HIV tests but often not. They would continue to pick up strangers in bars but throw in perfunctory conversations along the lines of “Do you have STDs? No, do you? No. Okay!” They’d play mind games with themselves that sought to evaluate risk based on some nonsensical…