What’s your R0?

Imagine you’re walking along the street. You see a group of people pointing up towards a building. You also look up to see what they’re looking at. Soon a big group forms and everyone is intently staring up at the point where everyone else is pointing to. And you realize there’s nothing there. It was a psychological experiment to show that if one person points upwards, chances are that a lot of people will follow.

Call it what you may. Herd mentality. Group think. But this has been used from time immemorial. Religion. Patriotism. The IPL. Linguistic fervor. And now, we’re seeing it in the Covid 19 paranoia.

Can we use the same thing to change the world?

You’re one of two types of people.

Exhibit A: The group that thinks that Covid 19 is not as dangerous as mainstream and social media make it out to be.

Exhibit B: The remaining who thinks that we need to wait for the vaccine before we can step out, or sitting on the fence not knowing whether to trust the doomsayers or the naysayers.

People in Exhibit A just need to talk to one or two people in Exhibit B. About:

Be safe, be aware but yes, you can step out of your doorframe with an infinitesimally low probability that you’ll catch it
Yes you can order Swiggy, you can go out and eat at restaurants and you can do the things you did before the lockdown.
Get onto a diet of not reading any info about C19. Reading the number of cases every day in your city and country is not really helping you in any way except to make you more paranoid.

And if each of those two people hop across to Exhibit A, they can start converting more and more people and restoring the world to normalcy. So similar to the virus spreading at a rate of R0 (the number of people infected by one person), we should look at spreading this message. And it’s not just by sharing this blog. You have to sit with them and convert them.

And if you’re in Exhibit B and reading this blog… Look for someone in Exhibit A to pull you over…

Social media was flooded with generic offers of help to friends after Sushant Singh Rajput committed suicide. Why don’t you convert some of those offers to pull people out of their Covid 19 depression?