Why some people take dangerous risks when trying to avoid Covid-19

Maybe we never got accurate information to help us evaluate all the dangers we faced in the pandemic.

Last summer I met up with two friends for dinner at an outdoor restaurant. I hadn't seen much of them in the early months of the pandemic because they were afraid to venture out. One said meeting up felt like “we're playing Russian Roulette with our lives.”
 

As an economist who studies risk, this struck me as peculiar. The odds of dying from playing Russian Roulette are 1 in 6. The odds of contracting Covid-19 while outdoors and distanced — and then dying as a youngish healthy person — were far less than 1%. But what really flummoxed me is