The reason not that many people get killed in a hurricane hitting the US is, ISTM, that the vast majority of people in the areas hit actually do heed the warnings and follow the government mandates. There are always just a a few people who flaut that and then become statistics.
Contrast that with this pandemic. You can see a hurricane with the nake eye; you cannot do the same with the corona virus. It’s much easier to deny that which is not immediately visible to you.
I think the bottom line is that the actual risk is based on total population, which, from a birds-eye-view perspective can be low. But at the individual level, if there is a non-zero chance of a bad outcome, then they are going to err on the side of not taking that risk. This is natural and expected. We all individually refrain from taking certain risks, regardless of what, in aggregate, the amount of risk really is. This is a rational thing to do because there is no telling if you are going to be the one with the bad outcome. Your chances may be low, but as long as there is a chance, and you can reduce it to zero by taking/not taking some kind of action, then you will.
The fact that people are overestimating their risk is not really surprising because as long as there is risk of serious illness or death, people are going to do what they can to not be the ones with the bad outcome.
The specific issue here that I responded to was about overstating risk, which can easily be expanded to the broader subject about effectively communicating about risk. And how we humans perceive and act regarding risks.
As to the latter, we suck. For some things that are very low risks we indeed do whatever we can, to extreme measures, to try to be sure we, or ours, are not the ones with the bad outcomes. For other things that are actually of much higher risk, we do very little. And knowing the numbers doesn’t always matter. We do not assess risk rationally. Rationally which should we be more afraid of, kids being shot at school or kids drowning in backyard pools? Which evokes more fear though? (In case it’s is not obvious many more child drownings than deaths in school shootings. Heck fewer shootings of kids in schools than in their homes. But the fear of school shootings is much higher.)
That to me is the actual problem with article that triggered this conversation: younger individuals overstated their numerical risk of death, but so what? Did their behaviors reflect that belief they were at higher risk, or a belief that their actions posed a more sizable risk to others? The number just does not necessarily correlated with action.
Communicating about risk is difficult, be it by officials or one on one. But one cannot excuse intentional misrepresentation of it.
The Weather channel overstates the risk of every single winter storm, as best as I can tell.
But an important difference between the novel coronavirus and a hurricane is that novelty means we don’t fully understand the risks. There is much more “up side” that it’s actually worse than we believe than there is “down side” that it’s actually more benign than data so far has demonstrated. That’s the thing about unknown unknowns, the risk is skewed.
So, while I certainly don’t think that lying about the risk is a good or helpful strategy, (and I don’t watch the weather channel, because they do that) I am currently more concerned with people downplaying it. As an extreme example, I had supper with a friend when the novel virus had first hit the news, but hadn’t really gotten started killing people in the US. I told her (a doctor) that I was really worried about it. And she asked if I had gotten a flu vaccine, implying that I ought to worry more about the flu.
I had gotten a flu vaccine, so she didn’t really know what to say. But I am an actuary, and I saw the potential for exponential growth (which came to pass) and I was completely correct to be more worried about the novel virus than about the seasonal flu. I mean, not in terms of “will I catch this in the next week”, because at the time, there was a lot more flu going around than covid. But in general, yes, covid has upended my life and killed two of my relatives and remains a serious threat to my health, and flu hasn’t done anything to me this year, and likely won’t.
Did the article mention a cite for such blatant misinformation. Nationally as of a week ago <30 5-14 year-olds have died of Covid. 2 in one district would be quite the oddity. Deaths in that age bracket of all causes are 3-4X that weekly.
I don’t have any idea what this means, so I guess you need to expand. Unknown risk is unknown risk. It doesn’t inherently mean more risk. It’s unknown.
Still, to this date, about the only thing I’m sure of is the demographics of death. Everything else is sketchy. I definitely think there is morbidity, effects of the disease without death. But we still lack hard numbers, and don’t know what the long term effects really will be.
Was just reading a story about an old football player. Contracted polio in college, prognosis was not good. Eventually got out of the hospital after losing a whole bunch of weight. He eventually built himself back up and was able to resume playing football. He did have post polio syndrome, bad migraine headaches for years. Those eventually became less frequent. That is a good story to read, because it doesn’t minimize the impact of the disease, but shows that people can go ahead and still live their lives.
“The experts” advising the public not to wear masks initially was a blunder. Doesn’t speak well for misleading the public either way about the nature of the illness. On the other side, I am completely burned out on clickbait. Fatigue is setting in. Four people got infected at the Republican convention. That was a story. Four. I need to know the demographics, overall facts.
Hurricanes come and go. They aren’t really comparable to asking people to change significant portions of their lives for an indefinite period. I am definitely worried about getting through winter and into next spring in a psychological sense. As time goes on, we really need to be targeted with our lockdowns and other strategies in order to keep people mentally healthy.
If you bang up your car in an auto accident, and take it to the shop, they will give you an estimate of what it will cost to repair it. But when they open it up, they may find unknowns. And it’s extremely unlikely they will discover something unexpected that makes it cheap to repair your car, but fairly likely they will find that some hidden part is bent, too, and it will cost more to repair than they realized.
Similarly, we haven’t yet “opened up the car” for covid 19. So far we know that x% of people age y-z are likely to die. And that younger people are less likely to die. But we are beginning to see long term non-fatal problems. How bad will they be? How many people will be affected? Will the problems be lifelong, or will they get better in a couple of months? We don’t know. Will people who had covid as kids be more susceptible to heart attacks in their 50s? Probably not, but we don’t know. There’s just so much that we don’t know.
Now… On the flip side, treatment has already improved, and I think some of those mortality rates are down a bit, although it’s really hard to know as I haven’t seen any recent studies of mortality-by-age. Whether or not there’s been much improvement yet, odds are there will be eventually. So in that sense some of the unknowns may work in our favor.
But… There are just a lot of unknown risks, and saying it’s not as bad as X is premature if you are just looking at the known risks.
What would you think of the argument - one seemingly founded in science, not in (somewhat baseless, as far as I know) speculation like the heart attack example - that exposure to this virus could result in some immune defenses for the rest of one’s life? And particularly if there are (unknown!) more lethal such threats to come?
Maybe kids are better off getting Covid now, because it’s worse the older you get. We just don’t know.
I take Covid seriously. But it isn’t April any more. I don’t know when my schools will stop being virtual. I take it seriously, but even prudent people are likely taking limited, calculated risks at this point. I’m not going to go out to a bar with a bunch of strangers. A small social circle? Maybe.
With younger people, it is honestly a question of how much of your youth do you spend in isolation given the risk. The clock ticks for all of us regardless.
The reason not that many people get killed in a hurricane hitting the US is, ISTM, that the vast majority of people in the areas hit actually do heed the warnings and follow the government mandates. There are always just a a few people who flaut that and then become statistics.
You speak truth. In southern Florida, very few people cry about “but muh freedums!” when a hurricane warning is issued. A couple of days in advance, the government is actively out there telling people to get their shit together. Universities shut down. Government buildings shut down. Schools shut down. These actions let people know they need to get their supplies and board up their windows and secure their air-bornable possessions like boats and whatnot. Mandatory evacuations in low-lying areas also wake people up and force them to protect themselves. It would be irresponsible for the government to allow people to do their own risk assessments when there’s so much uncertainty even in the good models that are available. If the government hadn’t yelled and hollered as much as it did for Katrina, even more people would have died.
The problem as I see it is that people become desensitized if the alarm is sustained for a long enough period of time. This is the situation we’re in now. It is natural for people to question whether the danger is really that bad when they aren’t seeing the sky fall (like what happens during a hurricane).
I think it was @Ann_Hedonia who said the cost of avoidance is lower than the cost of sickness in most reasonable people’s estimation. I agree. Seven months ago, I would have been heartbroken if you had told me that I wouldn’t be able to go watch a movie in a movie theater for the indefinite future. I wouldn’t have been able to imagine life without going to the movies. But if the movie theaters in my town opened today, I’d be all “meh”. The chance of me getting sick might be super low, but do I really need to chance it, given the ease of streaming videos in my living room? No. I might thoroughly enjoy myself in the movie theater, but that enjoyment just won’t be worth the pain, suffering, and yes, embarrassment of me getting seriously ill from COVID. I have had five close relatives of mine get sick. Only 2 out of them had a mild sickness. Three of them spent a significant amount of time in the hospital. The one who was the sickest (she was hospitalized for a month) was not that much older or burdened by underlying medication conditions than I am. So I’m not eager to roll the die to see what kind of COVID patient I am.
I’m going to push back against this a little. The reason that schools shootings are more viscerally scary than swimming pools or drowning generally is that as a parent, my kid’s chance of getting shot at school is pretty much exactly the same as every other kid’s chance. But his chance of drowning has always been much lower, because there are things I can do to modify it: I can live in a house without a pool. I can choose not to let my son go on playdates at houses with pools; I can educate him on appropriate behavior around pools; I can modify my own behavior when watching him at a pool (put away my phone; don’t drink). I can identify the factors pool drownings have in common and modify my life to reduce them. And even then, I am scared.
Now, even with all those precautions, pools are still more of threat than schools, but can you imagine if I (and many, many parents) didn’t bother with those rudimentary precautions? If we didn’t worry about backyard pools at all, no one had fences, kids of all ages swam unsupervised? The death toll would be mind-boggling. And the reason we take those precautions is that parents are (appropriately) bombarded with messages about the dangers of pools and drowning. We relentlessly educate parents, and it does have a tremendous effect on safety. And no where, in all that, did anyone ever seem to worry about whether I was being “over-warned”; no one ever told me my kid was old enough to bathe alone (seriously. So I sat in their with him till nearly Kinder, just in case). No one ever tells you “You have to balance the good memories of swimming in a pool in the summer with the reality that if kids can only swim when mom’s available, they won’t have many options. So as they age, you have to find the right level”. No one worries we are going to erode parents’ trust by overstating those risks.
So while school shootings may create a visceral gut punch, I don’t worry about them more than pools. It’s just that worrying about pools takes the form of concrete actions to mitigate risk, while worrying about shootings just takes the form of worrying.
In the same way, it seems like worrying about COVID needs to take the form of concrete steps to mitigate risk. But it never has. It’s been hysteria or nonchalance from the start. There’s been really very little actual education. Part of that is that early on, we didn’t know, so we got it wrong (all about handwashing, not masks) Later, though, it became political, a leadership thing: we needed a cohesive, coherent public education campaign, like we do for pools, and instead we got a mixture of not-my-job apathy and active downplaying in order to save the economy. So it’s just a total political mess now.
Why are you talking about weekly deaths when they’re most likely talking about total deaths. Two kids may be high but having kids back in school is new and they have a risk of exposure they generally haven’t had before. Not everyone was sending their kids to daycare and camp over the summer. Also, as needscoffee just stated, why are you not including older teenagers?
Do you mean by that, that you think people at higher risk should be locked down much harder, in greater isolation, and for much longer, because you think that then lower risk people wouldn’t need to take any precautions?
If so, you appear to be considering those at higher risk not to be “people” if you want to “keep people mentally healthy.”
And we are very much targeting “lockdowns”. Areas in which other precautions are keeping infection rates low are not locked down. For that matter, I don’t think anywhere in the USA is in any real sense “locked down” at the moment. Can’t speak for all other countries; but it doesn’t seem to me that that’s common elsewhere, either.
Smarter lockdowns does not necessarily equal “harder” for any subpopulation.
So for example -
Opening up bars early is not smart by what I’d consider reasonable risk/benefit analysis. A foolish trade off that many communities haven chosen to make.
Allowing nursing home patients visits by family members both masked and limiting time within a six foot radius, marginally slight increased risk to significant quality of life, and by much research morbidity and mortality, benefit. Make sure staff has adequate PPE, is trained and supervised in how it is used, cohort staff in teams of patient load exposures, test staff frequently and contact trace them rigorously (not done much in phase one). Smarter. But being done less often than opening up bars.
Second part first - really not so much so. Relatively few parents appreciate the degree of risk that their backyard pools present. It’s a bit of a hijack but here is a NYT article from May that discusses it.
I’d note that the above appropriately dings my profession for not communicating it well. I think more pediatricians discuss locking guns up safely to prevent accidental shootings (important) than do pool safety (much more important).
I will not be surprised if when the stats get collected there has been a bigger increase in childhood backyard pool drownings (from so many putting up pools relatively slapdash, being there rather than where there are lifeguards, and being unable to supervise closely enough or unaware enough of the degree of risk that they do not do it to the degree really required) than there will be COVID-19 deaths in the age group. Not saying it is the case, just that it would not surprise.
The first part though is something that I think is more key when we talk about individuals’ responses to risk: the sense (illusion?) of control. People are not so fearful of driving because they believe they have control over the outcome - they are skillful, they are cautious, they buckle up, their kids are in car seats, so on. The more a risk is perceived as under our control the more willing we are to take it; the less a risk is in fact under our control the more we do even irrational things to try to exert control over it, even when it is small. (It is part of understanding the psychology of the vaccine hesitant as well.)
And in any case, if there’s a school shooting at his school or if he nearly drowns in your neighbor’s pool, you and the rest of your family don’t have to go through an office shooting the next day or nearly drown yourself. In this case, your child’s risk isn’t just his risk we’re talking about here; it’s the threat to the community around him.
I’ve just seen too many people saying things that amount to ‘why don’t we just lock up all the people who are at high risk and then everybody else can go about their business without all these annoying precautions.’ I don’t know whether that’s what Jay_Z meant, which is why I asked for clarification.
– there are a lot of people at high risk who aren’t in nursing homes. I don’t think you meant to say otherwise; but I’ve also seen it presented as if high risk people were all too ill to be doing much of anything anyway.