Comment by __blockcipher__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __blockcipher__ | Hacker News Reader

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__blockcipher__

> Did you hesitate and worry about giving your own mother a hug afterwards?

But this behavior was never rational risk-reduction; it was always a result of the incredible fear-programming. Granted if you're making a point that trauma isn't always rational and can be induced unnecessarily by external sources I'm with you there.

I would really like to see less navelgazing about the emotional trauma of the Zoom class (not talking about you but the whole "elite" socioeconomic class in general - software engineers, management consultants, etc etc), and more recognition of the harms of suspension of elective surgeries (here in CA all elective surgeries were suspended statewide for a month despite a surplus of ICU beds and despite the fact that even if ICU beds were at capacity not every elective surgery warranted being cancelled), of having a parent or grandparent dying alone because the hospital wouldn't let you in the same room as them, of even the "little" things like cancelled dental checkups, missed allergy shots, missed pediatric appointments etc

If your mother was healthy and lived in the same household, maybe it wasn’t necessary behavior, but for folks like myself (and the countless millions of other Americans) whose family lives across the country and are severely immunocompromised, it was absolutely necessary.

My point is that regardless of their immune status, briefly hugging someone in an outdoor environment is not actually a risky behavior. Thus why I'm saying that it's really much better viewed as trauma induced by the societal fear-programming rather than an inevitable result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerging.

By the way, I do feel the need to mention this because it's not recognized enough: the closer someone is to death (as are most of the people at genuine risk of COVID-19), the higher the relative cost of spending a year of avoiding physical contact with loved ones. If your parent has only an expected value of 2 years left then they could easily spend 75% of that being deprived of social interaction and physical contact from loved ones. That's no small thing.

It would help to quantify the risk rather than qualify it as risky or not risky so that people may examine the risk against their own risk threshold.

I generally don't like to quantify things that don't have hard numbers behind them, but just to get some napkin math down:

Let's say there's a 1/1000 chance in infection of the parent if the [adult] child is actively infected during a brief outdoor hug. The chance of the child being currently infected depends on the current base rate but for the napkin's sake let's put it at 1/10. (As an aside, in actuality while there is evidence of pre-symptomatic transmission for SARS-CoV-2 the overwhelming evidence shows that asymptomatic transmission doesn't occur so just a heuristic of "am I actively sick or not" gets you good risk management anyway but let's avoid that for now)

Now let's say that the chance of the parent dying or having a seriously bad outcome given SARS-CoV-2 infection is 1/10.

That brings us to (1/1000) * (1/10) * (1/10) = 1 death per 100,000 of these hug-events. If we stick with my earlier example of someone with 2 years of life expectancy, that would factor out to (365*2*24*60)/(10^5) = 10.512 minutes "lost" per hug, if we assume that hugging someone doesn't have any positive effects on their physical wellbeing whatsoever.

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