Commonsense Thinking Regarding COVID19

1. You don't need a lot of knowledge/data/facts/intelligence to manage or survive the COVID19 pandemic. All you need is commonsense.
2. Common sense will tell you not to take unnecessary chances.
3. Broadly, every risk has two extreme outcomes: a best-case outcome and a worst-case outcome.
4. We are all naturally endowed with an innate understanding of asymmetries of outcomes (i.e. the best possible outcome is NOT the direct opposite of the worst possible outcome). And it is when we disregard that natural instinct that we get into trouble.
5. Proof of this instinctive knowledge is that we know that not all snakes are poisonous, yet we treat ALL snakes as if they are poisonous. Why?
6. Because we just cannot afford to take chances. The best outcome of interacting with a nonpoisonous snake is that you continue to stay alive (which already have). But the worst outcome of interacting with a poisonous snake is a painful death. Those are the two probabilities that matter in that instantaneous analysis that we perform upon seeing a snake.
7. Upon seeing a random snake, the only sure way to escape the worst outcome is to run away immediately. The moment to decide to toy with the snake, you're risking the worst outcome pain/death
8. Running away (or killing it before you are bitten) is the only way to guarantee 100% safety. Toying with a random snake brings down the probability of safety to 50% cos there is a 50-50 chance of the snake being poisonous.
9. Regardless of the state of your immune system or your faith in your God, if you catch COVID19, the best-case scenario is not that you survive and live normally. It is that you survive and all your family and friends who get in contact with you don't get infected, or they survive as well. But the worst case is not that you die. It is that you also infect your family and friends and some of them die too.
10. COVID19 is worse than a poisonous snake due to its multiplicative effect. Snake bites are not contagious, yet we do not take unnecessary risks with them.
11. If there was a potentially poisonous snake (or three) on every bus, in every office, in every church, in every mosque, in every elevator, in every supermarket, etc, what measures will you take to protect yourself and those you care about? Then what if the snakes were invisible and could fly?
12. For those who worry about the economy, thinking the economy is more important than a pandemic of "low mortality rate", I say you have it exactly backwards. Survival is a necessary condition for having an economy, but an economy is not a necessary condition for survival.

Cheers, and stay safe!

~Freeman Dugguh