Dear Steve,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful response!

I would really like my numbers to be accurate so would you please let me know where you learned that 40 Santa Monicans have died from March 15th through August 12th because of Covid?

And is it possible to learn how many Santa Monicans died from March 15th of last year to August 12th of last year so that we could compare to see if there was a marked increase due to Covid, please?

One point of my article is that the horrible possible death skews many peoples understanding of the probability that it will happen to them.

Analogously, lower class people think in terms of hourly wage, middle class people think in terms of salaries, and extremely wealthy people (the 1%, say) think in terms of net worth. The different contexts wildly influence the discourse.

The horrible horrible outliers that the press and media have paraded have biased many of my friends into disregarding the fact that high Covid communities (say, East LA) are mixed with low Covid communities (say, West LA) to paint an unrealistic portrait of both or either.

“White privilege” means that more people on the West Side can choose to live alone and how many people they interact with per day as well as what protection they use, whereas the agricultural workers in Central CA have none of those choices.

I wrote the article because I feel there are more intelligent ways for all communities to speak about the possibilities and probabilities of contracting Covid 19 and either dying from it or surviving it.

The 40 deaths in Santa Monica, from what I heard a few months ago, primarily occurred in nursing homes. If you have more recents statistics breaking those 40 deaths down by age and race then please post them here - I would love to see them and continue the dialogue!

Thank you very very much!

Ira