[mech1234]

In matters of life and death, being careful is important. Taleb and others have a lot to say about tail risk, and coronavirus looks like a large tail risk to me. If I were a resident or planned an urgent visit in a Seattle nursing home I'd spend a good bit of money on PPE.

The lottery ticket analogy does not work well. I'm reminded instead of the scenes in the Chernobyl mini-series where individuals are sent into unknown dangers- dangers that are impossible to see, difficult to understand, and require conscious thought and effort to avoid. Resources are scarce and authority figures do not have sufficient information to keep everyone as safe as they should. Whether you survive or not comes down to both luck (whether your place and duties precluded you from any other option) and ignorance (whether you picked up a chunk of radioactive graphite with your bare hand). Using PPE is an effort to counteract your ignorance.