How To React to COVID With Mojo

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 How To React to COVID With Mojo

Whether you are leading a country or just modelling for a group of friends, having mojo means your actions will be carefully watched. Actions will have consequences, too. As you deal with COVID, here is my advice.

1. Don’t ignore this virus. Many people with a lot of mojo think of themselves as invincible. They aren’t. The corona virus may not result in serious hazard for you, but because it is so contagious, it could for a lot of others. I use hazard to mean the resulting outcome. It is associated with a person. Risk, on the other hand, is associated with an activity. If you have a high hazard, that means a high probability of a bad outcome. It is not someone else’s problem. 

Some people think that having mojo means ignoring reality and pressing forward. Not true. The trick is figuring out what is reality, especially in an environment in which it is advantageous for someone to conceal reality. I am thinking about the misleading statistics about COVID. Don’t ignore them, but don’t expect them to tell the full story. Mojo means figuring out what the important numbers are. It means actin on the numbers, but only the really relevant numbers.

Let’s use fake names to illustrate the point. Take Brandon. Brandon shows bravado by saying, ”Oh, we are going to beat this thing” without specifying how or when. He is being Braggadocious Brandon. He may be right, that the virus may be beaten. However, he is not being helpful. He leaves the details to others. This is a strong sign of a lack of mojo. What Brandon is not doing is taking responsibility. He either isn’t willing to act or doesn’t have the expertise to know what to do.

On the other hand, take Mojo Mike. Mojo Mike is motivated to listen to the experts. He has the faith to follow their advice and the willingness to act on it. Even though Mike’s group may get more infections, they have a very low death rate. Their infections seem to be concentrated in the low hazard sub-group. They protect high hazard people, even wearing masks if necessary to do so. Mike doesn’t pay attention to hype or scare tactics. Mike doesn’t get scared by high numbers; he looks at numbers per capita. He doesn’t dwell on the past. Mike gets more out of daily numbers than cumulative numbers.

2. Don’t overreact. COVID is a nasty illness, but we live through many nasty illnesses without becoming paralyzed. Some are more deadly than COVID 19. Some viruses are more infectious than SARS corona virus 2. None have caused shutdowns in the past. Normally, we deal with risks all the time. This pandemic is not qualitatively different.

3. Have faith and trust that people are working very hard to understand COVID and reduce the susceptibility of the population. Susceptibility may be reduced by one or more of vaccination, treatment, or the immunity that comes from prior infection, not to mention natural immunity that we don’t quite understand. In the meantime, protect those who have high hazard. This will keep deaths low even if cases rise. When you talk about the future, you will be criticized for being overly optimistic. A high mojo person is used to this criticism. It isn’t blindness, it’s optimism.

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