American Roulette
Thursday, April 24, 2025 at 3:45PM (I figure I'm going to lose some friends with this one)
We are all familiar with the concept of Russian Roulette, a form of life or death gambling with one bullet in a six shot revolver. In an attempt to let you know how I am feeling these days, as well as other members of my social minority, I’d like to present the parable of American Roulette.
Imagine that we accidentally meet at the grocery store. As we start talking, I casually pull out a weird looking revolver.
When I say weird looking, I specifically mean a revolver with a huge cylinder that has 100 chambers in it. A 100 shooter instead of a six shooter.
I spin the cylinder, point it at you, and pull the trigger.
At this juncture you undoubtedly have a couple of questions to ask me. Questions such as “WHAT the FUCK?” and “Have you gone comPLETELY inSANE?”
My bland answer is, “Hey, what’s the big deal? I don’t even know if it’s loaded. It might have one bullet in it, or none, or five, or ten. No idea. And even if it did go off, I wasn’t aiming carefully. Sure, I might have killed you, but I might have just wounded you. I suppose if I wounded you, you might die of a secondary infection or whatever later, or be permanently disabled, but it’s not guaranteed.”
I am sure that this would not satisfy you. You would be reassessing my sanity and maybe our friendship.
Now, imagine walking into your local grocery store and watching almost everyone else in the place carrying weirdly large revolvers and engaging in a constant, mindless game of mutual American Roulette. It would be maddening.
Yes, I’m writing about Covid.
It’s hard to make an exact estimate of the odds of Covid causing hospitalization, disability, or death for any individual. There are many factors involved, including age, gender, disability, vaccination status, obesity, comorbidities, and the particular strain of Covid involved. Overall, the death rate goes up with age and existing health problems. For your average adult it’s somewhere from a 200-shooter to a 100-shooter. For someone in their 80s, more of a 20-shooter. But that’s just for acute Covid.
An individual’s chances of multiple types of disease go up after a Covid infection. Bacterial and viral infections. Three times the chance of heart attack and stroke. Seven times the chance of a pulmonary embolism and five times the chance of deep vein thrombosis. Marked increase in breathlessness after exertion and reduction in lung capacity. Increased incidence of diabetes, early onset Alzheimer’s, and Parkinsons. Virtually guaranteed brain damage. (See my Cat and Mouse post) It’s early days because of the time lag involved, but there are indications that Covid increases susceptibility to cancer. There’s also a study showing that having Covid increases your chance of a car crash by 1.5 times. It robs you of a few I.Q. points with each infection. Basically, anything that has to do with brain damage, immune system damage, and spreading microscopic blood clots through the vascular system. A measurable increase in morbidity and mortality. For those on chemotherapy or immunosuppressant drugs, or those with immune system disorders, it’s close to a death sentence.
Somewhere between one in six and one in ten infected people suffer long Covid. People get months or years knocked out of their lives, lose their ability to work, and experience financial ruin. Some people simply never completely recover.
That’s important to know in terms of individual risk assessment and risk tolerance, but also in the moral calculation of what we are willing to inflict upon others.
Covid is asymptomatic for days when carriers are infectious. Some people have entirely asymptomatic cases, yet are still infectious. About 60% of infections are from people with no symptoms. Just such a case happened to a friend of mine not long ago, after he had a meal with a seemingly healthy friend of his. Absent a professional grade test, none of us can be sure.
An axiom of firearm safety is “Always treat every gun as if it was loaded.” Hard experience is that the number one thing people say after accidentally shooting someone is “I didn’t realize that it was loaded.” It’s too late at that point; someone is dead or hospitalized.
A firearm is a tangible, visible object and a virus can only be seen with an electron microscope. A firearm makes a loud noise and the effect is dramatic and immediate, while a virus is silent and the effect delayed. Still, a virus is just as real and can kill or disable just like a bullet.
If that seems hyperbolic to you, just ask the opinion of one of the hundreds of people who died from Covid last week. Oh, right, you can’t. They’re dead. They’re dead because someone thoughtlessly breathed virus laden aerosol in their vicinity. Or, you could ask the millions of people with compromised immune systems who live with microbial crosshairs on them. They are hard to find, because they have to stay out of public spaces because our ableist society has decided that brunch is more important than other people’s lives. You undoubtedly know people who have had months or years knocked out of their lives by long Covid. People who are not the same as they were before.
And yet, as I walk through the world, I see few masks and little effort to prevent Covid transmission. I wear a mask in indoor public spaces, but that’s like wearing a ballistic vest to a mass gunfight. It does some good, but nothing is perfect. An N95 mask is 95% effective, not 100%. But that’s for a lone masker. If two people wear N95 masks, their combined effectiveness is 99.75%. The chance of a viral aerosol particle getting through drops from one in twenty to one in four hundred. Almost nobody is willing to put in that minor effort.
I learned an expression recently: skeptical hedonism. That’s the human tendency to discount the worth and truth of things that interfere with our pleasure. Masks are unattractive, inconvenient, and annoying. Testing is expensive and inconvenient. Spontaneous socializing in crowds is fun. So we get bullshit statements such as “It’s only a cold” or “Covid is over” or “You have to live your life.” A month of widespread masking would end the pandemic, but that would be a full thirty days of minor self-discipline, slight inconvenience, and concern for the vulnerable and disabled, so it won’t happen.
What might actually happen is society starting to treat air the way we started treating water in the early 20th century. Covid aside, millions of Americans are sickened each year by the pollutant laden microbial soup we breathe indoors. It’s been firmly established that high indoor levels of carbon dioxide and volatile chemicals wreck our ability to think. Employers and schools would see significant improvements in employee and student performance if they implemented modern ventilation and filtration. The side benefit would be far fewer people dying of Covid or having their lives ruined by its aftermath.
Over the past five years I have watched tribalism, delusion, and selfishness triumph over solidarity, reason, and generosity. I have felt despair, disgust, anger, and incredulity. I have watched people I regard as the most socially conscious blithely ignore the facts in front of them in favor of self-indulgence. The conservative tribalists with their “I will not comply” slogan didn’t bother me. I never expected much from them. What gets to me is the utter moral and intellectual failure of the portion of the population that is supposed to give a damn.
I keep thinking about Field Marshal Douglas Haig. He was the commander of British forces during World War 1. By all accounts, he was an intelligent man. He was well educated, and an experienced soldier. However, he sent hundreds of thousands of his men to pointless deaths. He did this because he couldn’t accept the reality in front of him. He thought he knew the right way to fight a war; the way he had fought it before. He looked at reports from the front that told him he was misreading the situation, that his tactics were failing, that men’s lives were being wasted. He couldn’t absorb the facts because he couldn’t give up his prior assumptions. It was a normalcy bias that led to mass death.
That’s where we are. 99% of people are being normal, ignoring those among them getting picked off. It’s like one of those horror movies where, as the monster stalks them, the main characters always do the dumbest possible thing. It’s a movie I’m tired of watching.
Those of you out there still masking, testing, filtering, and otherwise protecting the lives and health of your fellow human beings, I thank you. I admire your perseverance in the face of indifference, peer pressure, scorn, and harassment. When the H5N1 pandemic hits and the hospitals run out of refrigerated morgue trucks, it will be your job to patiently explain to your fellow citizens the absurdly simple ways to avoid dying.
To the other 99% of you who have given up on protecting yourselves and others, I have no idea what to say. If witnessing millions of deaths and ruined lives, to this day, can’t convince you to take an interest in self-preservation, or the lives of your loved ones, then what will my words do? I feel like Dr. Semmelweis in 1850, trying to convince his colleagues to wash their hands in between dissecting cadavers and delivering babies. Perhaps in thirty years reality will sink in.
Really, I’m not writing this with the expectation of convincing anyone. I’m writing this to get it out of my head. I hope it gives some gratification to my fellow Covid realists. I hope it gives everyone else some insight into the contained rage of those people you see wearing masks.
Covid, Masking, risk in Human Behavior 