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[personal profile] brin_bellway
[cw: illness]


[WIRED; Wayback] (by Gregory Barber; h/t Scott Alexander)

I guess I *kind* of knew people were using microcovid.org to budget their desired outings, but that's not how *I've* been using it. I care strongly about both not getting sick and not being among the first into a new situation whose risks are not clearly understood, and I have two relevantly-chronically-ill housemates and a customer-facing job: I was never going to have room to maneuver within my comfort zone. No, I use it for harm-reduction tips and for reassurance on trips I was going to be *forced* to make regardless.

This also means, perhaps unintuitively, that my thresholds are vastly *higher* than the ones given. If--real-world example here--I put in a bunch of deliberately pessimistic estimates and get a 4% chance that that family of customers with the dad who coughed on me gave me COVID-19, the Ibasho folks would say that's horrific, but *my* reaction was "oh good, a 96% chance that I got through that bullshit safely even in a worst-case estimate, that's better than I would have naively guessed".

("Fun" fact: I didn't get *COVID* from that interaction, but it may have been the cause of my COVID scare in November.)

---

It's dawning on me that microcovid.org was made by a San Francisco group house and I know a lot of San-Francisco-group-house residents: as such, I am very unusually likely to have heard of this and it may be more obscure than I thought. If you didn't know about microcovid.org before, I'm glad to have informed you. It's great stuff.

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Brin

May 2025

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