When Is It Safe? A Weekly Reader Soundoff
Introducing a new weekly pandemic feature: Asking you what you’re comfortable with, and what you aren’t.
The signature statistic of our age, I’d argue, doesn’t involve viral loads, or community spreads, or cases-per-population-density. The statistic is the micromort.
I learned about the micromort back in May in a terrific New York Times piece by David C. Roberts. I’ve written about this before, so forgive me if I explain the micromort by quoting myself. One micromort, Roberts explains, represents a one-in-a-million chance of dying from an activity. If something has a one-in-a-million shot at killing you, it has a value of one micromort, and “the average American endures about one micromort of risk per day from non-natural causes,” Roberts writes. Everything you do that has a higher chance of killing you increases that baseline number of one micromort. It is a common tool in the field of risk assessment, particularly when it comes to life insurance.
Life itself comes with inherent risk. Your odds of dying from something — and the micromort measures only odds of dying, not odds of becoming ill or seriously injured— increase anytime you do anything other than stay in your house and watch television, on a regular basis. If you ride a motorcycle for six miles, you have increased your level of risk by one micromort. The same…
