Imagine you see on the table before you a large bowl of your favorite candy. Let’s say there are 100 individually wrapped sugar delights just calling out to you to devour as many as you’d like. Oh, and did I mention they are all zero calorie and they make your breath minty fresh? I’m talking seriously good candy, my friends. 

So how many do you eat?

Oh, I forgot to mention one thing: three of the candies are poison and will kill you. But 97 of them are as described: yummy and wonderful. So, again I ask, how many will you eat?

When the Air Force sent me to grad school in the early 1990s, I took several statistics courses. Upon my return to the AF Academy, I often taught sections on stats to my political science students. And if you study enough statistics, you come to understand a basic truth about the good people of the United States: not too many of them understand statistics. And we especially tend to be pretty bad at risk assessment. We tend to obsess about things that are fairly low risk, but spend less time worrying about things that represent greater risks. When my late first wife was in her final battle with cancer, a well-meaning friend offered me a blanket filled with magnets to “pull” her cancer out. As she was telling me of this (quack) remedy, she was chain-smoking cigarettes. She really didn’t get risk assessment very much. (Another example of risk assessment failure is our president and his thoughts on vote-by-mail, but that must await a future column. Spoiler: the rate of fraud is not 8% as he asserted, but rather about four one thousandths of 1%).

I was recently reminded of the risk assessment conundrum when I read a Gazette news story about several Colorado Springs movie theaters reopening to customers this week. Now to be clear, I am very sympathetic to the owners and employees of such businesses. With millions of newly unemployed Americans out there, these good people are simply trying to find a way to stay in business. I get that. But I can also assure you I won’t be going to any movie theater any time soon. At age 62 with a couple of heath issues, seeing the latest release isn’t worth the risk of perhaps being in the same room as someone who may not even know they have COVID.

And there, of course, is the rub: what behaviors are ok, and what are not worth the risk? Math and science help here, far more than that thing you read on the internet from that guy who “proved” that masks actually spread COVID.

My youngest daughter is a professional horse trainer up in the northern part of Colorado, and during the summers she usually takes her students (human and horse) to a number of horse riding and jumping competitions. But her day job is as a scientist in a research laboratory, and she hasn’t attended a single show this year because she understands the science and, as she noted, “there is literally nothing less essential than a horse show.”

Gov. Polis has done a terrific job in a difficult situation. His calls to limit the spread of COVID through a range of restrictions has helped Colorado be one of the “better” states, if you will, in responding to the illness. Yet we still have had over 53,000 cases and we’ve lost more than 1,700 of our fellow Coloradans to the virus. So how much risk will you accept in order to see a newly released movie? Or to go to a horse show? How much risk is reasonable? 

Like most everyone, I’ve been to the grocery store throughout the crisis. But I’ve also been to the local building supply store to get stuff I needed to fix up things around the house. Was that a silly risk? 

Look, we have been asked to stay home as much as possible and to wear a mask. I think we can make it through those burdens without too much anxiety, regardless of what some may claim. Yet just in the last couple of weeks we’ve seen tens of thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts gather in Sturgis, South Dakota because, you know, freedom. And not at all surprisingly, we are now seeing COVID cases pop up directly linked to that event. Some schools are reopening and at least two colleges opened their campuses to students only to see COVID outbreaks that caused them to immediately close down and send the students home. Some colleges still plan on playing football this autumn while others (wisely, in my view) have postponed.

Most Americans don’t spend much time doing in-depth statistical studies, of course. But the willful ignoring of risk analysis — a hallmark of the Trump administration — means obfuscation and misinformation will dominate the news cycle. I urge urge my fellow citizens to think about risk more fully and to understand that wearing a mask isn’t repression, it is compassion for others. Being forced to wear pants, now that’s repression.

Stay safe, stay home. Oh, and be careful about how much candy you eat out of mystery bowls.