No, I was being a little loose with my language there. I didn’t mean the literal worst case of being patient 0. I agree that I don’t plan for that. My personal risk tolerance is higher than that.
I meant the more colloquial worst case of hearing about a deadly virus spreading rapidly in the news and then deciding to react with an abundance of caution once it seems probable that my community will be affected. Then I’m fine playing it safe.
Just like I would with any other forecasted threat from Mother Nature like a fire, hurricane, blizzard, etc.
The more certainty it’s going to affect me + the greater uncertainty of the short & long terms effects = the greater the caution.
So in 2020 when I was highly confident COVID would infect my community + there was very little info about how deadly it was = I was overly cautious
As more info came out I became less cautious.
We started wearing masks because covid actually existed, not because we feared that it might one day exist. Fear of hypothetical future covid strains is an example of the later, not the former. I'll consider fearing them once they actually exist, just like those hypothetical future flu strains.
That information always lags reality. When/if the next deadly flu strain emerges, it will have emerged before it is discovered to have emerged. If you're not planning for this scenario, are you really planning for the worst case? You could be Patient Zero for Spanish Flu Part Two, with your preemptive masking being the difference between global disaster and nothingburger.