The biggest news story today, overtaking even the US-Taliban peace deal that may lead to the end of the Afghan war, is the novel coronavirus. Since being first reported to the WHO in late December in Wuhan, and claiming its first known casualty in early January, the virus has spread all over the world and captured the attention of the global public as a pandemic.

Unfortunately, a non-trivial fraction of us are very, very bad with probabilities; I count myself in that fraction. In the early stages of the news cycle, following right behind stories about the newest quarantines and infection numbers (currently over 90,000 total people infected and over 3,000 deaths), there are numerous stories about how ridiculous the coronavirus panic is. Genre-savvy folks, who remember the panic over Ebola a few years back, have decided to jump ahead of the bandwagon to point out how ridiculous the preppers are. They write articles saying: “Look at those Silicon Valley techies wearing face masks and refusing to shake hands! Look at the silly doomsday preppers buying hazmat suits and gas masks! Aren’t you glad you’re not one of them? Now we reasonable, level headed folks can get back to the real issues; the seasonal flu and anti-Asian discrimination are far greater issues than COVID-19.

Those articles quietly died out over the last week as the numbers of infected continued to explode, the estimated mortality rate of the virus was revealed to exceed 3% (30 times greater than the 0.1% of the seasonal flu), and WHO and CDC recommendations came out in force. But more concerning than the articles themselves was the statistical illiteracy that they revealed, a dearth of knowledge masquerading as expertise. The repeated reference to the seasonal flu being more dangerous because it kills more people is startlingly wrong, even for the news media. It’s altogether quite similar to claims that people should be less worried about, say, terrorism, than car crashes or drowning in your bathtub, given that the latter kill many more Americans each year. If you haven’t seen these claims, either as self-congratulatory tweets or news stories, I link some here.

Such statements are popular because they seem rational on the surface. Event A is a thing people worry about, but event B is something people don’t worry about, yet is more likely to kill you. Therefore, you should stop worrying about event A. The people who agree with the author get to feel validated, people who disagree get to either feel shocked or make angry tweets, and whichever site that published it gets advertising revenue.

The issue is that these articles, tweets, memes, etc, are comparing apples to oranges. Specifically, comparing thin-tailed and fat-tailed domains. It’s a basic concept in probability science. Certain causes of death, like the seasonal flu, or lightning strikes, or drowning in your bathtub, lie in a thin-tailed domain. The probability of being killed by one is quite stably low from year to year, and the probability that the number of deaths from a given cause will, say, double, is next to nothing -- only probably occurring in lifetimes of the universe. The common property of objects in the thin-tailed domain is that they are distributed and disconnected from individual events. There is, and there will be, no mega-bathtub that thousands of people are in when it suddenly overflows and everyone drowns. In the absence of such a giant, rare event, chances of substantial increase or decrease in such deaths are slim to none.

But then there’s the other domain, which human intuition can sometimes map well, but which smug rationalizers routinely fail to. The fat tailed domain. In his 2007 book, ‘The Black Swan,’ Nassim Taleb calls thin-tailed domains, “Mediocristan” and fat-tailed domains, “Extremistan.” The latter are defined by exactly the kind of giant, rare events that are lacking in thin-tailed domains.

The Business Insider piece criticizes the Cato Institute for including 9/11 in their analysis of terrorism deaths because 9/11 represented a huge spike in such fatalities. With 9/11 included, there were 74 deaths per year from 1975 to present. However, since 9/11, there were just 6 deaths per year. That writer completely missed the point that in these domains the outlier is exactly what matters most. It is ridiculous to suggest that analyses of terrorism should exclude the deadliest of attacks because the fact that such attacks occur is precisely the purpose of conducting that analysis.

If it wasn’t already obvious, the novel coronavirus outbreak is solidly in the fat-tailed domain. There is no vaccine, we don’t know its origins or its life-cycle, and most current treatments are for the symptoms, not the disease. A novel disease that comes out of nowhere and quickly spreads across the world with exponential growth in infections is the exact scenario that keeps epidemiologists up at night. And still, millions of people fail to take even basic preparations, such as getting jugs of water, non-perishable food, and extra disinfectant wipes. Jacob Falkovich of “Put a Number On It!” explains the phenomenon better than I could. There is almost no incentive stronger than maintaining social standing, even in serious situations. People can sit in rooms quickly filling with smoke and fail to leave or say anything because nobody else does either. Likewise, they can watch a possible pandemic develop, and recognize it may get serious, yet totally fail to take even small personal precautions. The possibilities of shortages, quarantines and especially being exposed to the virus personally seem far away to most people, but the mockery from one’s peers for wearing a sanitary mask is all too near and clear.

I’m one of them. I just got around to buying some extra disinfectant while I was writing this article, and still haven’t gotten around to other necessities. The urge to push it off becomes it seems far away is powerful, and it’s also a case of human intuition breaking down under social pressure.

Be rational about the coronavirus. That means acknowledging low-probability, high-impact events and taking basic precautions against them. Even in the event of a major pandemic, you’re not likely to be personally infected, but your standard of living will be affected. I’m talking to you, the reader. Yes you. You’re not magically exempt from this for whatever reason you’re imagining. If you were waiting for someone else to stand up and make a fuss about it, take this as that moment. Better safe than sorry.