How to make good enough choices during the coronavirus pandemic - Insider

"No one's sure what the right thing is to do," Kelly Thomas, a lawyer in New York City, told Insider. ?

As states begin to open restaurants, beaches, and workplaces to varying degrees, many people like Thomas are asking themselves new questions about what's safe: Go to the family gathering or settle for Zoom.

But infectious-disease and psychology experts agree on a few effective ways to assess risk and make good-enough decisions without going mad. .

"This virus really likes people being indoors in an enclosed space for prolonged periods of close face-to-face contact," William Schaffner, an infectious-disease expert at Vanderbilt University, previously told Insider.

The worst coronavirus clusters around the US have been tied to places that force people into close quarters for extended periods, like nursing homes, correctional facilities, and meatpacking plants.

"The farther away you are and the shorter duration of contact between you and other people means you get less efficient virus transmission," Schaffner said.

Once you have a grasp on the practical risks associated with various activities, consider what you value about them rather than what you fear could happen if you pursue them, Julie Pike, a clinical psychologist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, told Insider. .

"I just cannot tell you the positive impact it has had for all of us," Neidich told Insider. .

Mimi Winsberg, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer at the mental health telemedicine service Brightside, told Insider?

There's still a whole lot experts don't know about the coronavirus, and that alone "really messes with us, because we can't run the math on risk, and then there's too many choices and then we get paralyzed," Kate Bowler, an associate professor at Duke Divinity School, recently said on the Happier podcast

To manage that, every two weeks, she does an in-depth catch-up on the news, talks to trusted medical experts, reevaluates her own personal risk as a cancer survivor, and decides what behaviors to keep or change for the two weeks going forward. 

While it can seem like information about what's risky changes by the minute, the reality is that "reliable information accumulates very, very slowly," Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University and expert in risk assessment, told Insider

Plus, getting too deep into the weeds of conflicting data and misinformation can lead to confusion that skews your judgment. "When there are competing narratives and competing information, people are going to lean in the direction of what they wanted to do anyway," Tony Lemieux, a social psychologist at Georgia State University, told Insider

Ultimately, making decisions during coronavirus 2.0 is going to be imperfect

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