Certitude

It is in extreme moments that subtle strengths and weaknesses become more apparent. I used to say this about the Trailwalker 100km challenge: walking that kind of a distance, your weaker joints or muscular imbalances will come out, and eventually by the 80th kilometre the weaknesses will metastasize into full-blown motion ceasing discomforts that can only be overcome with your inner strengths of determination or the resourcefulness you bring to the walk. Now I would probably use the marathon example because a single 42.2km event is far more revealing than any number of half marathons.  Whether it's your mental game, your flexibility, your proprioception, your ability to run "tangents" (the shortest route) or race strategy are not quite there, it makes a huge difference.

Covid times seem much like this, too. Countries have revealed their values and fault-lines and people's critical thinking, communication, biases, probabilistic literacy also become more obvious. The former you can see in the varied pandemic responses. The latter is though less about bulk mortality is also rather disturbing: I know many smart people who interpret simple statements poorly. Let's take a few example statements with the common inference:

- "Masks do not prevent infection." (So why wear them?)

- "Full vaccination does not prevent transmission." (So if I'm only protecting myself and my risk is low because I'm young and healthy, why would I get vaccinated?)

Both of the statements can be correct if one understands them as black-and-white statements where "prevent" is an absolute thing; but neither fact should be presented or understood in a black-and-white way. It is the same with the risks of side-effects from the vaccination and the chance of getting seriously ill from Covid. Even the best masks over time will allow the possibility of infection and some masks are better than others. Masks also have a psychological function - they do show that you care about others and others will often give you a wide berth. Widespread mask wearing can make the non-wearers more apparent and cause you to take an even wider berth, especially if they are inside. The second fact was true about all vaccines at the stage 2 trials, i.e., before they were even approved for use outside a study. But that they reduce the chances of infection (a prelude to transmission) as well as shorten the time shedding virus if one is infected and possibly, though not yet verified, with virus particles that are of a poorer quality than from an unvaccinated person (i.e., that the antibodies in a vaccinated person may incapacitate the shed viral particles). All is to say that those two statements deserve better verbs:

- Masks reduce the probability of infection to the healthy and reduce the probability of the infected transmitting the virus.

- Full vaccination reduces the probability of one becoming infected, and further reduces their chances of transmission, and possibly even the severity of a subsequent infection.

Certitude for things unknowable or not completely knowable is a vice in my book but no-one is comforted by probabilistic explanations, and we seek our authorities to be definitive and clear. When experts speak and are pinned or lulled into voicing the much desired certitude at one time, they're mocked later for flip-flopping when new evidence becomes available, typical retrospective bias. There were all sorts of statements made in 2020 and early 2021 about the end of Covid and then Delta came. The approach of NZ, Australia, Vietnam, China and Taiwan worked rather well before Delta came along and it cracked set-up without fail. And even if we see off our current outbreak, the odds are on that it'd find another crack before too long, with or without some cautious reopening to a hopefully highly, and freshly, vaccinated populace. But even that might be a disaster: there is a plausible future where our virus naivety might count more when the successor to Delta rolls in and states with survivor immunity during the tamer earlier waves are spared while the protection from the vaccine, based on the original strain, is ineffectual. Or Delta could be the end of it; or an even more contagious but completely innocuous strain outcompetes all others and gives every essentially free immunity.

What could be retrospectively analysed as some pre-existing determining factor in any state or group of people for success or disaster might just be the result of chance. Drunk drivers don't always crash their cars after all, while great drivers may err fatally on a rare occasion, and people are bound to find reasons for these outcomes. It might, once the heat of this prolonged Melbourne moment has passed, to judge whether the lack of success in suppressing Covid completely and then the unrest that has recently followed were from pre-existing weaknesses, or just circumstance. Just like the arguable success in New Zealand might be some intrinsic factors (centralised response, island nation, trust-oriented) or that we just had a better hand given to us by Lady Luck.