My Daily Life Is a Game of Roulette
Medicine has never been about certainty, but odds.
Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET on October 21, 2021.
A pair of realities: This week, Colin Powell, the former secretary of state whose service under President George W. Bush is most prominently associated with the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, died at 84 due to complications from COVID-19, despite having been fully vaccinated. And: There are conditions under which any generally healthy person would most likely have a seizure.
These facts, as strange as they seem in juxtaposition, are related—neither describes events at all out of the ordinary, and yet both arrive as a kind of shock, with the sense that something must be amiss. They share this: They’re matters of probability, and probability
