I have been noticing a troubling development with regard to people’s thoughts about how protective their measures to avoid infection have been. I first noticed this with myself, which “tuned up” my ears so I am now recognizing a major problem everywhere. In the early days when the nature of the covid threat was unknown, those of us that were concerned enough to take the need for protection seriously were very careful. We wore masks, washed our hands, sanitized surfaces, sanitized groceries, sometimes wore gloves, etc. We tried to learn how long the virus lived on various surfaces, how far it would spread in the air – and for how long, etc. Over time we were told that perhaps some of this isn’t quite as important – maybe social distancing is good enough sometimes, maybe we don’t need to be quite so fussy about surfaces, maybe we can relax a bit. And for most of us, we haven’t gotten sick – so obviously our lower measures are effective. Clearly we don’t need to “always” wear masks, don’t need to wash our hands after touching anything outside of our homes, don’t need to scrub down the cereal boxes.

The problem comes from out having no way to determine if, or when, there is an actual threat. We don’t know when viruses are present on surfaces, or in the air, or if a person is infected. The “positivity rate” in California is sometime like 2.6% meaning that 2.6% of people that get tested are positive (infected). Unfortunately, that is based upon those that get tested for some reason, meaning that most of them have concerns (or actual knowledge) that they might have been exposed. It is not a random selection, therefore it is almost certainly quite high. The real percentage of people testing positive is probably closer to 1% (one person out of a hundred), with pockets of much higher values and others that have rate that is much lower – but we don’t know where those locations are and they move so even if we knew it would be “yesterday’s” information, not necessarily reflecting what it is now. That means that perhaps less than 1 out of 100 people walking around are actively infected. The chances of encountering that person is slim. For example, I find myself in a building with other people perhaps once a month, potentially being exposed to maybe 5 people a month – and that exposure is while maintaining distance and everyone wearing a mask. Did the distancing and masks help? Who knows? It is highly unlikely that any of the people that I was remotely in “contact” with was infected – therefore I have zero knowledge or feedback on whether or not the protections were effective. But since I didn’t get sick I assume my protective measures worked. Perhaps they did, and perhaps they didn’t – I have no information to inform me on those topics.

After almost a year of performing my mini-tests, I find that I am getting pretty complacent – and I see a lot of other people getting extremely complacent. I often hear people say things like, “I see this person regularly, but we both take our precautions so it is very safe to do so.” Really??? Perhaps if you both really take all of those precautions, but I know you don’t because I watch and see that hand washing is seldom done, I see distancing much less than six feet (which is bogus in any case – it needs to be more like 30 feet to be marginally effective), I see nose-out masking, I see people spending time inside with others. All is well until one of the people that are assumed “safe” no longer are. When nobody is infected the protective measures appear to be highly effective (because they aren’t needed). Those same degraded protections might well not be effective once that situation changes and they are actually needed – but we have no way of knowing if, or when, that has occurred.

We are entering a period of much higher risks of being in the vicinity of infected people because it continues to spread. The number of cumulative “cases” in California has gone from 1 million at the end of November to 3 million at the end of January with a doubling time of about 1 month. That means that by the end of February it is likely to be 6 million and by the end of March perhaps 12 million cases. “Cases” means those that have been infected and become sick enough to need treatment. Those make up about 10% of the population of infected people. There seems to be no particularly great statistics available about this, but it is pretty clear that within a month or so it is reasonable to assume that almost everyone that has any exposure risk will be infected. It will no longer be 1 in a 100, it will be 1 in 1. So the question will then become whether or not you trust your life with whatever protective measures you are implementing.

The thing is that there is no possibility of vaccines having any appreciable impact on this in a statistical sense. Perhaps it will provide protection for those that are vaccinated, but those will not be available in anything like the numbers that will be needed as the infection rates spike in the coming weeks.

I think that this is the time to be ultra conservative, not a time to be complacent that since we haven’t gotten sick our approach to protection is good enough. Most likely we just haven’t yet been in the approximate vicinity of infected people. That will change quickly.