covid birthday paradox risk model

The holidays are upon us which means a time of celebrations with friends and family. Well, it would mean that in any other year. Unfortunately there is still a pandemic spreading across the country despite how some of your friends and family are acting on social media. You need to stay home this year and I brought the math on why using the COVID Birthday Paradox.

The problem is that we are all notoriously bad at calculating the actual risk we take when participating in our lives. All of us are. We grossly underestimate the external risk, overestimate our ability to personally mitigate it, and otherwise assume “it won’t happen to me”. The COVID Birthday Paradox calculation helps show the real risk of being in the room with a COVID positive person.

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