The Calculated Risk of the Coronavirus

by George Friedman: We live in a world filled with risks, some large and some small. When we step off the sidewalk to cross the street as the light turns green, there is a risk the car to our left will suddenly accelerate and kill us. We see it stopped there, we evaluate our desire to cross the street, and we decide the threat is too small to delay us. Overwhelmingly we are right. On rare occasions, someone gets hit and dies. We do not respond to the risk by refusing to cross streets when cars are on the road. The cost of eliminating all risk is too high, and the probability of the risk materializing is too small. It’s a calculated risk, when the risk of doing something or not doing something is understood. Sometimes the calculation takes months. Sometimes it takes seconds. But it is always there, and you are always analyzing it and making decisions accordingly, rightly or wrongly. Risk and reward are at the center of human life.

And to be sure, humans are not averse to risk. Many cultivate risk as a gourmand chooses from a menu. There is a pleasure in choosing to confront a risk and an exhilaration in surviving it. My wife loves to scuba dive. We learn the mechanics of diving so that the risks are controlled to the extent they can be. The point is that risk is an integral part of life, even a rare pleasure, not solely a burden that we must live with.

Though most of us try to avoid risk, it is everywhere. Life itself is a risk that shares its place with rewards. Every relationship is a risk, for people we meet may carry with them some unknown and even uncontrollable threat. But it is impossible to live our lives alone, because man is a social animal, and even the most reclusive of us must make a decision based on uncertain and poorly glimpsed realities. We cannot eliminate it any more than we can refuse to face it. The best we can do is calculate the risk.

Which brings us to the coronavirus. It causes just one disease in a world filled with diseases, some of which are fatal, and any one of which could strike at any moment. Yet we press on. A big difference is that the coronavirus is new, and we fear new risks far more than old ones. It is highly contagious, but for 98 percent of those who contract it, it will cause a week or two of illness. For those of us older than 70 or suffering from other diseases, it is far more deadly. None of my research suggests Hungarian Jews over 70 are exempt from this calculus.

Our collective solution to combat the coronavirus is to avoid all human contact. We share no comments on the weather or laughter. There is little commonality among us, save the suspicion that this person in aisle three might cause my death. A disease that has a degree of calculability has caused us to fear not only the stranger but also the friend. And now we must keep our distance from each other, by the command of the state.

If this meant that the disease could be eliminated in a certain time, it would be worth it. But the fact that it might subside after we all hide doesn’t mean it won’t reemerge. Quarantine can mitigate but not eliminate the enemy. Our calculation is that we can push off the reckoning by living strange and inhuman lives. Sometimes, when the risk has grown out of proportion in our mind, and the reward seems to be life itself, the finely honed risk-reward ratio loses its bearing. The decision has been made that the disease must be battled at all cost, even if the battle can’t be won; any compromise with the fact that it exists and will not readily go away is considered reckless and dangerous.

And so we risk the consequence. With human contact rendered unacceptable, our ability to produce what we need to in order to live declines to the point of potential disaster. We have established a calculation in which the risk from this disease outweighs all other risks, from wreckage to our economy, to the solace of friendship.

We might hope that our vast medical-pharmaceutical complex will invent something to at least mitigate the disease. But the ethical foundation of that complex is risk aversion. So a vaccine can’t be produced in less than a year. The consequence is a vast fragmentation of humanity, and the threat of an economic failure not seen in 90 years. The avoidance of risk creates the apparent certainty of disaster. The idea of calculated risk, where the risk of harm is measured against the certainty of harm, is absent.

The attempt to shut down New York City is a loss of all proportion. COVID-19 is a nasty disease, but the possibility of being sequestered in a Bronx apartment like the one I grew up in, for as long as it takes, is appalling. And then there is the problem that we don’t know how long “however long it takes” is. But when you don’t know what to do, the most unbearable solutions seem the only reasonable ones.

Avoiding the pain of the novel coronavirus demands isolation and economic disaster. There should be a symmetry between the risk and the calculated solution, even if it is merely a temporary respite.

Perhaps, until the flawless vaccine is created, the calculated risk must be that we will endure this disease as we have others. The Black Death killed perhaps half of the people in Europe’s cities. HIV killed most it infected. Heart disease and cancer will kill many of us. We live with them by taking calculated risks. Some of us may die from the risks we take. Others will not. But a disease that likely kills less than 2 percent of those infected, the old and rarely the children, demands a different risk-reward ratio. There is a possibility that I will die from it. But there is the certainty that the current measures will create deep hardship for my children and grandchildren by wrecking the economy. For me the calculated risk is this: I probably won’t die, and if I do, I will not have to live with the vision of a shattered country, and the shattered lives of children I both love and must serve.
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Dr. George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures (@GPFutures). H/T Turning Point USA.

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