First off, congrats to your daughter! Huzzah!
>> I am not sure if it was a rational choice
I think my dad would say this: you were not
rational about it, but you were
reasonable about it. I think that's an important distinction.
From an early age, he always said, "There are reasonable risks and unreasonable risks." Though with the benefit if hindsight, he also admits that many of the risks he took were unreasonable. On the other hand, I think we all take precautions that are unreasonable too.
I don't believe we can make fully
rational choice with respect to risk in most cases where we are debating the question. Clearly, we know that Russian Roulette with seven bullets in an 8-chamber revolver is a very risky activity, but those decisions are easy.
Is it rational to drive a car? I can't answer that without knowing a person's situation, values, needs, including emotional needs. But in most situations, I think we can agree that it's a reasonable risk.
Is it rational to drive a car drunk at high speed? No, and it's not reasonable either.
Is it rational to climb mountains, race cars, ride a motorcycle, get pregnant, change jobs, retire early, retire late? All of these things carry considerable risk, but they are all done frequently and in all cases, sometimes it's the wrong decision.
I think the important question, which is also most often impossible to answer, is, "Am I being realistic and honest about the risk?"
I would guess that in most cases, helmetless motorcyclists who engage in lane splitting, billionaires who want to tour the Titanic, base jumpers and many others are not being honest with themselves about the risk. But maybe they are and they just don't care about the consequences.
I know when I was younger I underestimated the risks of mountaineering. I *think* I'm more realistic/reasonable now and, as a result, have quit doing certain forms of mountaineering, but it is still really hard to know exactly how risky something is.
On the Covid question, I think at this point, an otherwise healthy young person with no co-morbidities should be doing things they enjoy. Loneliness, depression, anxiety and many other diseases of isolation are also really, really dangerous and kill people too. Suicide deaths for males aged 25-44 (30 per 100,000) are many multiples of the Covid deaths per 100,000 for similar age groups (0.15 for the 30-49 age group). So roughly speaking, the chance of a prime age male dying of suicide is 200X the chance of dying of Covid. The numbers look better for women, but a lot of that is because women engage in self-harm and suicide attempts that are deeply destructive to them, but which fall short of fatality.
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https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db464.htm -
https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2023-03-10/three-years-into-the-pandemic-who-is-dying-from-covid-19-nowSo to me, something that makes a small but significant difference in someone's mental health is worth taking a significant risk with Covid. So, if your daughter got an emotional boost, even a small one, from the event, I think the Covid vs mental health numbers say it is well, well worth the tradeoff. But if I were, say, a recent kidney transplant patient or on immunosuppressants for some other reason, that would change my calculus dramatically.
Again, that all comes down to situation, values, needs and many many other factors, which is why I say that I feel that we rarely have enough information to make truly rational decisions about risk in those cases where it is not obvious.
