How to Assess Your Risk After Being Vaccinated
Risk assessment is hard. Nearly every situation has a range of different variables that affect risk, and only some of these variables can be quantified. Others we have to estimate, and in the human brain, emotions inevitably get tangled up in the process of trying to make those estimations and come to an overall idea of how risky something is or isn’t.
“This is why medical doctors and people in public health train for years to help people understand the public health landscape and marry public health with their own individual conditions and risk,” Lucy McBride, MD, an internist in Washington, DC, said. “There’s no way an algorithm that can do that.”
Nevertheless, I did help create an interactive tool for the New York Times last week that attempted to offer a framework for assessing the risk of different situations when a person is fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Many people found it helpful while some others found it confusing or misleading. Was it actually high risk for a vaccinated person to eat dinner in a busy indoor restaurant with poor ventilation? Some who tried out the tool thought that’s what it was telling them.
To help clarify how the tool can be most effectively used, I figured I’d walk through a couple examples as sort of case studies. Before going into each one, however, it’s important to clarify…
