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It would help to quantify the risk rather than qualify it as risky or not risky so that people may examine the risk against their own risk threshold.
by aaron-santos 5y ago
It would help to quantify the risk rather than qualify it as risky or not risky so that people may examine the risk against their own risk threshold.
- __blockcipher__ 5y agoI generally don't like to quantify things that don't have hard numbers behind them, but just to get some napkin math down: Let's say there's a 1/1000 chance in infection of the parent if the [adult] child is actively infected during a brief outdoor hug. The chance of the child being currently infected depends on the current base rate but for the napkin's sake let's put it at 1/10. (As an aside, in actuality while there is evidence of pre-symptomatic transmission for SARS-CoV-2 the overwhelming evidence shows that asymptomatic transmission doesn't occur so just a heuristic of "am I actively sick or not" gets you good risk management anyway but let's avoid that for now) Now let's say that the chance of the parent dying or having a seriously bad outcome given SARS-CoV-2 infection is 1/10. That brings us to (1/1000) * (1/10) * (1/10) = 1 death per 100,000 of these hug-events. If we stick with my earlier example of someone with 2 years of life expectancy, that would factor out to (365*2*24*60)/(10^5) = 10.512 minutes "lost" per hug, if we assume that hugging someone doesn't have any positive effects on their physical wellbeing whatsoever.