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So many commenters here and in the OP on Reddit are asking "Why is anyone flying?"
I understand the question, but to understand the answer, you need to consider the scale of the pandemic.
1/ https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1259335575586271233
I understand the question, but to understand the answer, you need to consider the scale of the pandemic.
1/ https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1259335575586271233
Let's say you (reasonably) assume that an issue that is urgent enough to warrant a flight arises 0.1% of the time. In America, that means 3,000,000 people have issues of sufficient urgency...every day.
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Just keep playing with that number: 1 in a million? 30,000 people. Per day.
As it happens, we had a socially distanced farewell picnic with a friend who is moving back to London from LA last night (two blankets, two meters apart).
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As it happens, we had a socially distanced farewell picnic with a friend who is moving back to London from LA last night (two blankets, two meters apart).
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Their circumstances are incredibly complicated and also personal, so I won't explain them here, but basically, it's a combination of a string of really bad, rare beats and the alternative (staying here) is neither physically safer nor psychologically healthier.
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The coronavirus has affected ~7B lives. That means that seven ONE-IN-A-BILLION problems are cropping up every day.
It's also important to keep this scale issue in mind when hearing good and bad news about covid.
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It's also important to keep this scale issue in mind when hearing good and bad news about covid.
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As a planet, we're finally doing a TON of testing (not so much in the USA or UK, but...). That means that super-rare test failure modes will crop up a lot. Like the incredibly rare cross-contamination of three consecutive tests that deliver false positive or negatives.
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Or the incredibly unlikely circumstance in which two people in close quarters, one of whom is sick, fails to infect the other.
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It's worth looking closely at these things to see what's going on there, but their mere existence could just be the kind of odd coincidence that crops up when you flip a coin 7 billion times every day.
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Like, maybe that person who didn't get covid from their spouse despite their intense eyeball-licking kink means that we've discovered someone with natural immunity whose plasma will save us all, or...
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Maybe they just got incredibly, amazingly, wildly lucky. Or maybe they just had the incredible BAD luck to have a succession of false-negative results from their tests.
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It's REALLY unlikely that you'll have several false negatives, and it's really unlikely that you could indulge an eyeball-licking kink without transmission, but it's a big, weird world.
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Flip a coin enough times and it will land heads 50 times in a row. Or land on edge 50 times in a row. We're doing a LOT of coin-tosses, is what I'm saying, and so NOT seeing highly improbable outcomes is even more improbable than the outcomes themselves.
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