Sam Leith
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Still, needs must. So far my only home-schooling success has been getting my son to map an epidemic in the fictional nation of Covidia (pop. 10,000). Each day, anyone who has the lurgy spreads it to three other people. Anyone who has it gets better after five days. Social distancing (two infections per case) starts on day five; lockdown (one infection per case) starts on day seven. The vaccine — which stops the spread — arrives on day nine.
An eight-year-old can do that maths. Mine did. A little light multiplication, some four-digit subtraction, rinse, repeat and you’re there. And when we plotted it on a graph, it swooped up in just the curve you’d expect. The lurgy swept through Covidia, and at last subsided, and the good people of Covidia went about their business as before. But there were limits to the verismo of our little exercise. There was no social psychology. No politics. No economics. And no fatality rate. This lurgy didn’t kill anyone.
Here’s another type of calculation that I think many people are making. We think: what if I took my hour’s exercise at the same time as my friend, and chatted from two metres away in the park? What if I popped to the shop to pick up a bottle of plonk, or some basil to make lockdown pesto? I mean, you’re going to be two metres from other people in the park, so why not someone you know? I mean, basil and wine aren’t technically vital to subsistence, but the virus doesn’t know that, does it? We’re thinking of pinch-points in the pasta aisle, or the narrow path into the park. And we’re thinking, vaguely, of the surfaces we’ll be coming into contact with — that door that will yield to an elbow on the way in but not on the way out; the handle of that shopping basket; the keys of the pin-pad.
But we say to ourselves, perhaps: come on. I’m being good. I’m not one of those idiots who flouts the rules. I’ll be careful. There can’t be more than a one in a thousand chance that I’m going to get the virus or pass it on! Who knows: perhaps we’re right. Let’s say one in a thousand — not the sort of odds that make us turn a hair as individuals — is bang on. So for every million people who go through the same thought process, and draw the same conclusion, and go out for that bottle of plonk, that’s an average of 1,000 potential new transmissions.
We find it, as I say, hard to properly take in what’s happening, to make the leap from thinking about personal risk to thinking about population-level risk and the way we’re all implicated in that. We know, on paper, that 1 per cent of a very big number is still a big number. But we don’t yet know it in our bones. The whole movement of our culture over the past 50 years has been away from the collective, and maths can only do so much to reverse that.
Because you read about coronavirus
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