24 October 2020 | New Scientist | 45Dan Jones is a freelance
writer based in the UKwith, try to keep perspective, both by
determining whether the numbers you are
dealing with represent relative or absolute
risks, and by evaluating whether your
emotions are amping up their significance.
Also, stay up to date. While obsessively
following coronavirus news can have its own
mental health risks, in a situation changing
this rapidly, it is important to seek out trusted
sources and evaluate risk assessments as new
information comes in. For instance, early in
the pandemic, it seemed that surfaces could
be a major source of spread. Now the latest
evidence is that sharing air indoors may be
the most dangerous factor. Remember too
that you cannot eliminate risk altogether,
and that there are trade-offs: avoiding one
risk may create other, worse ones.
To help get our heads around all of this,
some public health officials believe it may
be useful to set yourself a weekly “contact
budget” – taking into account your personal
circumstances and vulnerability to severe
consequences of infection, and then aiming
to limit the number of activities with higher
levels of potential exposure to the virus (see
“Your contact budget”, left). It is also critical
to consider how your choices could imperil
or protect other people, says Gigerenzer.
Although we aren’t out of the woods yet,
this pandemic will eventually pass. But will
we learn anything from it? “I think this is
going to change us a lot, and we’ll handle this
very differently in the future,” says Schrager.
“In many countries, including the US, risk
communication has been a big public health
failure. There’s been no real consideration
of how to make the risks associated
with covid-19 meaningful, and how to
communicate these in a way people can
understand.” Perhaps one benefit of this
crisis is that it will finally serve as a wake-up
call for the importance of improving how
we talk – and think – about risk. ❚How did you come up
with the idea of a contact
budget for interactions
with others during the
coronavirus pandemic?
Back in March and April,
most people had clear
guidance about what
they were allowed to
do, and it wasn’t very
much. That made life
somewhat unpleasant,
but it also made life easy. When things
started opening up, everybody had to
make their own decisions about what
they are comfortable with and what
might be risky.
The way I was thinking about it
is that there is a level of risk I am
comfortable with. If I go to a grocery
store during a really crowded time, to
keep my average risk level constant, I’m
probably not going to do something
risky the next day. We are all familiar
with the idea of financial budgeting,
it is easy to translate to this situation.
How do we make a contact budget?
There are four metrics to keep in mind.
First is how much risk you can tolerate.
If you or someone in your household
has a medical condition, then your
tolerance is going to be lower.
Next is how comfortable you are
knowing that you could get infected
and transmit that infection. That’s
something we don’t talk a lot about,
but people have told me how guilty
they felt afterwards.
The last two pieces are the amount
of contact we need for our job and for
our mental health.
If you are a healthcare worker or
grocery store clerk, a certain amount
of contacts are required as part of
your job. Then there are contacts
that you need for emotional reasons.
It could be really important to you
to deliver groceries to your elderly
neighbour or to attend
a religious service.What factors give an
activity a higher risk
or “cost”?
Think of person, place,
time and space. “Person”
is about how many
people are there, and
how many you are in
regular contact with.
The less regular contact you have,
the more potential for expanding
your infection network.
“Place” is about whether
something is inside or outside,
whether it is crowded, and the risks
associated with that location.
“Time” is the duration you’ll be
there. And “space” is whether the
location is well ventilated and how
well you can maintain masks and
physical distancing.
Whether necessary or optional,
how do you make an activity as low
risk as possible? Can you eat outside
or get takeaway instead? Could you
get the same benefit virtually?What if you blow your budget?
I remember friends who did Weight
Watchers who would say they blew
their diet so they’re just going to eat
whatever they want. That’s the wrong
way to think about this. It is better
to realise that you spent a lot on a
particular activity, and now you need to
save up for more contact in the future.
You can also budget proactively. If
it’s really important to attend a friend’s
30th birthday party, in the days before
and after, you can make sure you are
doing low-risk activities to average
it out. Interview by Carrie ArnoldEleanor Murray is an epidemiologist
at the Boston University School for
Public HealthYour contact budget
Thinking about interactions in terms of possible
exposure to the coronavirus can help us manage
risk, says epidemiologist Eleanor Murray