Every evening for the past fortnight or so, fireworks have been going off where I live, in east London. This is not, despite what the US press might have you believe, in honour of Joe Biden’s election victory. It’s because Brits are very fond of setting off fireworks at this time of year. Not only do we have Diwali to observe, but we also feel a pagan compulsion to celebrate Guy Fawkes’ failed attempt to blow up parliament four centuries ago by setting off small explosions of our very own.

All these splendid bangs, and the dangers associated with setting them off — some 2,000 British people end up in hospital with firework burns each year — have got me thinking about risk and how we tolerate or even embrace it some moments, and try to avoid it at all costs at others. Another, more lethal seasonal risk is the flu — in a bad year, as many as 25,000 people die from the virus in England alone. Yet this year, thanks in large part to lockdowns, flu cases are way down across the world and are likely to stay that way.

That’s because the habits we’ve adopted to limit the spread of coronavirus — handwashing, mask-wearing and distancing — are effective for other respiratory pathogens too. “The measures we’re taking are enough to essentially eliminate flu,” says David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge university. A study by the US Centers for Disease Control has found huge falls in flu activity both in the southern hemisphere’s winter and in the US summer season.