People want a simple answer. Is this action safe? But despite Anthony Fauci bouncing responsibility for COVID-19 risk assessment to individuals, your risk can’t be boiled down to one probability.
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Articles on Risk
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Despite the halt to the federal mask mandate for mass transit, people may still choose to protect themselves. For those who do, the type of mask and how well it fits matter.
People tend to dislike uncertainty and risk – two things that are hard to avoid completely during a pandemic. That’s part of why it can feel especially draining to make even small decisions these days.
More than two years into the pandemic the world is a very different place. But this only partly explains different people’s responses to COVID.
Calculating your risk of death or hospitalization if you are infected with the coronavirus requires good data – notably, the total number of infections in the US. Unfortunately, that data is fuzzy.
If you see the Tesla Bot as a joke or a harbinger of a dystopian future, you could be missing the real threat, which has more to do with Elon Musk’s power than robots run amok.
How you respond to a risk depends on how you weigh the costs and benefits of an action. The problem is you’re not just a logical computer, and emotions bias your interpretation of the facts.
It seems as though every other week there’s a study telling us coffee is good for us, or it’s bad for us. Here’s what to make of this new piece of research.
Climate change, in its impacts on our society, will have the capacity to destabilise and push social, political and economic systems to their limits. We will have to be bold.
We often underestimate dangerous risks because they are slow or we think we are in more control of them than we actually are.
Flood plain statistics can be confusing. There are better ways to think about the risk of severe weather than 100-year storm or flood.
A moral philosopher and bioethicist offers parents some tips for weighing family masking decisions.
The government says hotel quarantine is ‘serving Australia very well’. But if you look at the leaks as a proportion of COVID-positive returnees, it’s a different story.
Even with low case numbers, you can argue COVID restrictions shouldn’t end early. Here’s why.
People have a hard time assessing risk in the best of times. Adding a world-changing pandemic with evolving and sometimes conflicting information has made personal risk assessment much harder.
How do we reasonably and accurately balance the risks of the AstraZeneca vaccine against the benefits? Conceptualising risk can be tricky, but the government’s latest advice is sensible.
The rush to evacuate communities and abandon nuclear energy was understandable, but an error.
The pandemic has made many of us acutely aware of the daily risks we need to take. The ancient Greeks often did not leave risky choices up to individuals alone.
A new study argues for selective border relaxations. But with COVID-19 more prevalent now than at almost any point in the past, the risk would be substantial.
The new SARS-CoV-2 variant is already spreading in the US and could be dominant by March, the CDC warns. Here’s what that means for the masks you choose and how you practice social distancing.
Top contributors
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Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions, Arizona State University
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Associate Professor, Epidemiology, Deakin University
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Professor of Risk Management, University of Bristol
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Associate Professor of Economics, University of Miami
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Associate Professor of Geography, University of Alabama
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Associate Professor of Economics, HEC Paris Business School
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Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Oregon
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Professor, Finance, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney
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Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Director of the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney
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Associate Professor of Markets, Public Policy and Law, Boston University
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Timothy J. Jorgensen is a Friend of The Conversation.
Director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Graduate Program and Professor of Radiation Medicine, Georgetown University
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Visiting Fellow, Macquarie University Applied Finance Centre, Macquarie University
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Professor - Risk governance, culture, remuneration, Macquarie University
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Professeur, philosophe et politologue, École normale supérieure (ENS) – PSL
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Senior Visiting Fellow, School of Medical Sciences, UNSW Sydney
