What risks should we take with the new virus

Dear Reader,

I feel rather shocked at the new virus, now I think we should all sit down and have an adult conversation about risk and reward.

When I was a PhD I have the privilege to be a member of the Loughborough and District Amateur Radio Society. One of the men in the club was a high voltage electrical enginner (expert in protection and switchgear) who had spent much of his life building and servicing high voltage systems. He told me a story from his youth about risk and reward.

In world war two he was a test pilot, it was his job to fly bombers after their wiring had been modified around England. He told me that the chance of encountering a German fighter was low and if he had a problem with the aircraft he could have landed at plenty of airfields. He was likely to have been given this relatively safe duty as he was an electrical engineer. He told me that one night after a day of safe flying he was having a drink when a bunch of men who have just got back from bombing Germany find him. They accused him of being a cowardly engineering BLEEPER and other bad things. They then tell him should join then on the next combat mission.

While drunk he agreed to it, and the next day when sober he did not wiggle out of it. He boarded a plane as a passenger and then was taken on a round trip to south east Germany. He told me that it was a horrible experience which filled him with terror as a series of people were doing their best to kill or seriously harm him. He got off the plane when it landed a wiser man. He told me from that point on he viewed risk in a different way, he made an effort to never take a risk unless it was outweighed by the reward.

For example one of his favorite methods of finding corona discharges in substations was to visit at night to look for the tell tale glow. But he had a well planned method. In the day he would arrange for a chair to be delivered to a safe location in the substation. He would wait for dark, order it to be deenergized, he would go to his chair. Sit down and then order the power to be switched back on. He would then survey the site from the comfort and safety of his chair. After this he would order the power to be disconnected again before leaving the substation. To my mind this is a adult and sensible method of working. He plans the work to reduce the risk to himself.

What we can learn from this man is that we should not take large risks in our lives when the reward is small or non existent. We should not do dangerous things out of machismo, neither should we risk our well-being (or that of others) for an easy life.

Now with the virus it is impossible to eliminate the risk to our wellbeing, but we can take steps to reduce the risk to ourselves. One step we can take is to try to avoid touching our faces in public places. As one of my coworkers commented “the whole world has become like a radioactivity area”. When you are in a contaminated area I would strongly advise you not to rub your face. At Chalmers we have a system of work which I call “clean hand, dirty hand”. The idea is that for many tasks I keep one hand clean while the other hand is gloved, the gloved hand is in the fumehood. The idea is the gloved hand reaches into the hood and moves contaminated objects around. The glove never leaves the hood, I would not want to pick up a contaminated object in a gloved hand before pulling the hand out of the hood and then touching “my face, my notebook, my biro, the handle of a pipette, a door handle, the handset of a phone, the fridge door etc etc”.

Another thing we can do is to avoid entering situations where we put ourselves at risk of infection, think before we travel.

The problem I see is that some governments are not willing to take action to reduce the spread of the virus. While it will be impossible to totally prevent the spread of the virus there are things which can be done to slow the spread. In the FT it was explained that the UK approach is based trying to obtain “herd immunity” by allowing the virus to spread more in society. This has been reported elsewhere. It has been pointed out that depending on herd immunity when it is a disease which causes about 2 % of those to be infected to die and causes serious health effects in about 20 % is not a good public health policy.

One of the problems is that the new virus spreads with greater ease that SARS. I am considering trying to model the spread of the new virus using some of the equations used for nuclear criticaility calculations. It might seem an odd choice but in some ways the operation of an atomic bomb (like those dropped on Japan) is similar to a vast outbreak of a nasty disease. Both in terms of the effect on human health and also in terms of some of the maths.