Case fatality rate or more casually death rate is a prism through which many of us are evaluating the Covid-19 situation. The evaluation resides on a principle where how alarmed we should be is proportional to death rate. Since Omicron seems to have lower death rate than previous waves, we are choosing to be relaxed about it. The principle is essentially seen in personal terms. If death rate is low, chance of I or my dear ones will perish is low.
I wonder
whether this association between collective measure and individual assessment
is correct. What it means for me that death rate is 2%? 2% death rate means out
of 100 Covid cases, 2 will die. It does not tell anything about which two. Seen
from personal lenses, one can be either among 2 who are succumbing or 98 who
will be surviving. Individually, there are only two possibilities that I either
die or survive after contacting the virus and becoming ill.
One will
try to argue that but these possibilities are not equally likely. That is the
right argument when considered in frequentist way. Suppose we think about 100
parallel worlds emerging from a point where one becomes ill due to Covid, in 2 worlds
one will be dead and in 98 one will be alive. But in each world, one can be
either dead or alive. There is no probability at individual outcome level. Yes,
the world where I will be dead is less likely to occur as compared to the world
where I am alive. But do I know which world I will be living?
We often
neglect the fact that probabilities tell nothing about the particular outcome.
Probabilities make sense only at collective level. At particular, individual
level, it is just a set of alternatives with one emerging as a reality. The
lack of confirmation about which outcome will occur in particular incidence is
precisely what the uncertainty is.
So for an
individual, there is no reason to be more relaxed about Omicron. But this
implication raises a puzzle. Covid increased the probability of death for us.
But then it wasn’t zero before. There was probability of I catching flu or some
other contagious disease which could have killed me. If my attitude towards
pandemic need not be relaxed when I am facing less deadly variant than why I needed to be more serious in the first place?
This is a
question I have not pondered over much, but once I started thinking about it, I could see things in different light. More I think about it, I see that that
those who let their masks down to their chins are perhaps the ones with most human response to
this virus. The smart guys who told us to flatten the curve were too serious about themselves, may be a reason why they occupy the high places. But the usual guys have not tried to be more serious
than what they could be. What we snigger at as an irresponsible behaviour, is a
consistent response to virus, of being a human who cannot maintain responsibility of being alert for long. The so called irresponsible behaviour is a logically consistent behaviour.
The so called Covid appropriate behaviour is perplexing and may be perhaps why
it is so hard to maintain.
Being
stoic, less melodramatic towards possibility of death and reclaiming our
pre-Covid life back while using masks and medicinal advantages should be our
response, for Omicron or for next variant. We anyway cannot subdue ourselves
because there might be some tragic deaths in our path of pleasure-seeking.
Let’s leave the pretense and use the virus to better align ourselves with binary
uncertainty of life and death we always have to live with.