Assessing Your Risk of COVID-19

What is your individual risk of getting the disease and how bad it will be for you?

The TL;DR version of this is that it depends because it really does. You as an individual have your individual immune system, hygiene practices, exposures, preexisting conditions, etc. It is almost darn near impossible to calculate your risk of getting a disease in any meaningful way. Essentially, you will not get a number from 0% to 100% on the likelihood of you catching it.

So what do you do? You need to think at a higher level than yourself or your family, or even your neighborhood. There is this principle in geography and social sciences that, simply stated, says that people who are like each other tend to be close to each other geographically and/or socially. Think about it. How different are your friends from you, really? Chances are, they’re also close to you.

Because of this, it makes some sense to look at the aggregate data and try to decide your level of risk from that. And that is very much what we do with all sorts of diseases and conditions. For example, each child is different, but — at the aggregate level — we know that vaccinating children prevents all sorts of childhood diseases. So we in public health give guidelines on vaccination and depend on the individual healthcare providers to…