Eric's Risk Assessment
I noticed a sudden outbreak of unfavourable personal risk assessment discussion. In the Bad Place a noted Long Covid advocate talking about "doing your own risk assessment".
Why is this account named "Eric's Risk Assessment"?
My innocent twtr techy account opened in 2008 became rather totally focused on covid once I could get out of bed again and log in around mid Apr 20.
My follows became chock-o-block full of aerosol physicists, chemists, doctors, epidemiologists, virologists...
Eric's Risk Assessment
Doing your own risk assessment is not a pandemic management strategy.
But when the parts of the system that are intended to manage risk collectively stop functioning, doing your own risk assessment, properly, is
a. all you have available
b. all that will keep you safe.
You should probably know something about how to do it as a result.
Eric's Risk Assessment
That's the Why. Now the What.
This account is:
- a scrapbook of stuff I find that goes into my Zotero database on Covid, currently north of 3K papers (thanks to @jmcrookston )
- my thinking about pandemic RISK & RESPONSE
- my explanations & justifications of my thinking
- discussions of how to structurally think about pandemic risk
- my deployment of my expertise in the face of an entire system telling me one thing over & over about a massive system failure mode:
Eric's Risk Assessment
It was increasingly clear that physics, chemistry, threat analysis, failure mode & effects analysis, disaster management & risk management disciplines were utterly absent in the response to the pandemic
My perspective is formed fundamentally by thinking about how large scale complex systems fail, & how to prevent that
Perhaps I could share my learning along the way. Maybe help others think about threats, risks & responses.
I realized maybe I actually have something useful to share.
Eric's Risk Assessment
I learned early that management always needed the "do nothing" option.
I didn't expect pandemic management professions like ID, IPAC & public health to take it literally - that until RCTs showed that something could effectively be done, nothing should be done.
It was a realization right out of "Yes Prime Minister". Were we really following the "Four Stage" Strategy?
The epistemiology of the disciplines seems to encourage it
Eric's Risk Assessment
I later shortened it to "Eric's Risk Assessment". I adopted my account avatar mission patch to express my view of how the pandemic has been managed.
I kept this in the move to Mastodon because I began to realize I just don't think about the pandemic the way most do.
Much to my shock, I realized public health & pandemic management had some deep seated programming around the medical idea that intervention *is* harm. Or at least could be harm. Thus "first, do no harm".
Eric's Risk Assessment
As I found out more about IPAC regulations, I focused on understanding the failure modes & effects, so I could get to some kind of threat & risk model.
My posting became more & more about the components of COVID risk, short term & long.
When the CDC started promoting "do your own personal risk assessment" instead of masking, I knew that was a very bad sign.
I was so overwhelmingly pissed off I sarcastically renamed my now 100% covid twtr account to "Eric's Personal Risk Assessment".
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