Among our few certainties is the economic aftershock we face and its aggravation by authorities Rationality, despite what many economists and philosophers like to believe, is hardly a defining human trait.
And in times such as these, when the world is fighting a pandemic, irrationality rules. A key reason why we do stupid things in challenging times is that we find it difficult to differentiate between risk and uncertainty.
Simply put, risk is when one has some idea of the chances of losing when taking an action. Uncertainty is when you have no clue what the outcome is going to be.
In mathematical terms, in the case of risk, the outcome is unknown, but the probability distribution governing that outcome is known.