Fear of COVID
Polls indicate that Americans are very poorly informed about COVID facts. That doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t think it should surprise anyone. A lot of people have trouble with complex scientific information, especially if there’s math involved. It doesn’t help, either, when the popular sources of information – the writers and pundits of the MSM, and/or social media – either don’t understand the information itself, or purposely present it in a skewed and/or confusing manner in order to stir up fear:
“These results are nothing short of stunning,” concluded the firm. “Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19.”
It amuses me, in a bleak way, that the site reporting on this news gets it wrong, as well. Here’s the quote I’m talking about. The problem is in the third sentence – it’s actually not the risk of death that’s being reported as 80% in older people, that’s the percentage of the COVID deaths that involve older people:
On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.
Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.
Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger by a factor of 50; and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).
And this comes as no surprise as well:
What’s perhaps most striking from the survey is the connection between age of the respondents and their misconception about the virus. The younger you are, the more likely it is that you don’t understand.
“The discrepancy with the actual mortality data is staggering: for people aged 18–24, the share of those worried about serious health consequences is 400 times higher than the share of total COVID deaths; for those age 25–34 it is 90 times higher,” says the report…
People who get their information predominantly from social media have the most erroneous and distorted perception of risk.
Those who identify as Democrats tend to mistakenly overstate the risk of death from COVID-19 for younger people much more than Republicans.
In addition, here’s an interesting study from China on the risks of catching COVID from close contact. It seems to me it’s less than originally thought:
3410 close contacts of 391 index cases were traced between 13 January and 6 March 2020…
Among 3410 close contacts, 127 (3.7% [95% CI, 3.1% to 4.4%]) were secondarily infected. Of these 127 persons, 8 (6.3% [CI, 2.1% to 10.5%]) were asymptomatic. Of the 119 symptomatic cases, 20 (16.8%) were defined as mild, 87 (73.1%) as moderate, and 12 (10.1%) as severe or critical. Compared with the household setting (10.3%), the secondary attack rate was lower for exposures in healthcare settings (1.0%; odds ratio [OR], 0.09 [CI, 0.04 to 0.20]) and on public transportation (0.1%; OR, 0.01 [CI, 0.00 to 0.08]). The secondary attack rate increased with the severity of index cases, from 0.3% (CI, 0.0 to 1.0%) for asymptomatic to 3.3% (CI, 1.8% to 4.8%) for mild, 5.6% (CI, 4.4% to 6.8%) for moderate, and 6.2% (CI, 3.2% to 9.1%) for severe or critical cases. Index cases with expectoration were associated with higher risk for secondary infection (13.6% vs. 3.0% for index cases without expectoration; OR, 4.81 [CI, 3.35 to 6.93]).
Propagating fear allows the Dictators to have more control. Fear is a very strong emotion.
As I mentioned awhile back, my CNN while in quarantine watching BiL (late 60s age), is very afraid of the virus. We played golf today, and then afterwards he was very upset with me when I said the colleges and schools should all open. His response….”oh yeah, let’s just start the pandemic all over again!” He was quite emotional about it. No amount of stats that I could quote have any effect.
On FB any one who attacks me for presenting some more positive stats on the virus project their fear, and also their leftist politics. Weird combination of TDS, leftism, and total trust in any Democratic government and the news media.
Since I haven’t reported here in awhile. Nationally the second surge which started in early June, could be partially attributed to the parallel increase in testing, but not all. I estimate about 60% was actual new cases. Since mid July, over 5 weeks now, the number of active cases minus the recovery rate has dropped by 50%. Even Florida has moved passed peak in both cases and deaths. The percentage of serious cases out of the active cases has declined from a high of 3% in mid-April to the present 0.7%, a 78% decrease. So if you have an active case the chances of it NOT being serious (hospitalization) is 99.3%.
Here in CT we’ve had just over 50 days of flatlined new cases at about 70/day, and deaths for the same period of about 1.3/day; average from all other diseases is 110/day. Our “Good Governor” said in early June when we had those sort of numbers we would go to Phase 3….guess what??
physicsguy,
Have you checked out CLI (COVID like illness)? The number of people reporting CLI in emergency rooms has dropped like a rock. Under 2% just about everywhere in the US.
It’s pretty clear that this wave throughout the south was a lot of hospitalized ‘with’ COVID as opposed to ‘from’ COVID. Not all but a pretty significant amount. How we ever get out of this mess I don’t know.
Biggest policy mistake ever.
The biggest mistake currently being made is testing people who have no symptoms. This is beyond stupid and will lead to schools reopening somewhere around 2037 if we keep doing this.
Never in history has any ‘illness’ been tracked and reported like this. Monumentally stupid.
The link is to a wonderful presentation by a Dr. Merritt, a surgeon, covering many of the issues involving the virus and the scare tactics used to allow our betters to lord over us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjYvitCeMPc#action=share
Never in history has any ‘illness’ been tracked and reported like this.
And that’s a huge part of the problem. Our technology is being used without proper reference frames. The 1968 Hong Kong flu had similar death rates but no genetic testing. All they knew then was that there was new virus that was nasty. Testing is a tool and also a weapon for fear. It tells us how many cases and thus helps define the mortality rate. It can also scream in the headlines: “x new cases today!!!!!”.
physicsguy:
Yes, science is a double-edged sword here, helping to create the illusion of an illness that is so much worse than back then, and a populace that is terrified.
neo,
Then throw a massive dose of politics and stir it up with social media.
I really don’t know how this ends. Masks forever I guess. Cases go up wear masks everywhere, cases go down see the masks are working keep wearing them forever.
At this point it’s really much more of a ‘casedemic’ than pandemic.
From day one this was about creating a state of hysterical fear. Trump bought into it, so a large part of our present circumstances rests on his shoulders. It wasn’t difficult to learn Fauci has a zero track record of ever being right about anything.
I live North of San Antonio in Texas in a county that has had little problem with the virus, Bexar County which is San Antonio has had a lot of illness and death and I had an annual visit with my doc today and asked him what he thought about this stuff. My numbers on my blood work were excellent and he told me that even if I caught this COVID, in my mid 70’s I am healthy and he would not worry to much, I would be sick and get over with it. He said the folks who have been stricken with the stuff and who die have complications and make poor life style decisions, the younger ones in San Antonio are out moving all around living in multi-generation families many of them over weight with diabetes themselves and then bringing it back home where there are elderly people with complications.
I also suspect that in our part of Texas and further South where there are a lot of people with little or no health insurance making a call for a COVID death when there is any suspicion of COVID allows the hospitals and doctors to collect a lot of federal money. Politics and money and meanwhile in our area to keep the stores open and people working we wear our masks and go about our business, mostly politics and not science used to make the decisions.
Why should anyone put any reliance on any Red Chinese data, studies, scientific publications, etc.?
And, how do (so to say) bio-medical sinologists sift any possibly useful information from such publications?
The media (right and left, BTW) tends to overstate the general prevalence of any disease and not to focus on target populations. You saw the same thing with AIDS, where the media totally downplayed how minimal the risk was to the heterosexual population. There are three reasons for this behavior. First, it sells newspapers (or produces clicks). If people think that a particular problem only affects other people (which is indeed the case for many problems), they won’t bother reading about it. Second, there is an ideological motivation for those who care about the problem and therefore want to stir up broad popular concern, by making it sound like everyone’s problem. Third, in some instances, like the current one, overstating the generality of the problem advances a partisan agenda shared by most of the media.
Regarding testing everyone, even healthy people; Notre Dame and Michigan State have both closed again. I think ND uncovered 149 active cases. That’s about 1.5% of the student body. I can’t recall all the serious flus and colds I got in College, but there were a lot. At least one a semester. Kissing strange girls, sleeping feet away from strange boys, drinking, not sleeping, playing sports to exhaustion. And that was just an average Tuesday night. If you test any student body you’ll find a teeming petri dish of scary stuff. I even collapsed once on the cafeteria floor due to Mono. When I came to I was being put in an ambulance.
But by all means, let’s shut entire campuses down anytime a few kids test positive for COVID, despite the severity or the presence or absence of symptoms.
Another thing that is a tell is when the media really emphasizes cases when reporting on stories involving schools or sports. An example was the Miami Marlins baseball team that had an ‘outbreak’ right after the season started with about 20 cases but you really had to dig to find out that one person had mild symptoms and the other 19 were asymptomatic. So they were risking shutting down a billion dollar business over one guy with a cough. This is why we should not be testing people with no symptoms especially those under about 60. The same thing is going on with colleges and schools right now. You have to really dig to find anybody actually sick just cases, cases, cases. God knows when some kid gets sick it will be all we hear about but until then it’s just cases.
Testing positive does not mean you are sick. Hell most of the time you are past any infectious stage by the time you find out.
The problem is that China lied. China continues to lie. So any study from China must be assumed to be a lie.
This is a serious problem. It would be as though you could not trust the source of your news information. It would be as though you cannot trust your doctor to provide correct medical care.
Based on examples of large numbers of people in close contact coming down with this virus, this is very infectious. It also is not very dangerous to young people. Most of the clusters are of people who likely got a very high virus dose, that overwhelmed their system in prisons or “care facilities”, and likely vitamin d deficient.
One interesting data point. Grocery clerks would seem to be high risk to catch this. Yet when I ask clerks at the local grocery store, “have they been tested”? They say no. This tells me that “health” departments that shut down our economy, know most clerks have been exposed. If tested, this would shut down all the grocery stores for two weeks, and expose the true nature of this panic.
The number of documented cases is likely to be only 5 to 10% of those infected. This is why testing of those without symptoms is important to get a handle on what is the actual danger. When the number of cases goes up when you increase the numbers tested, that tells you nothing.
We should have tested a random sample of 10,000 people each week. They could not do it. It would have exposed the hoax.
Just remember this panic ends November 4th.
The misinformation out there is terrible. Both my sons came up from Brooklyn this past weekend for a Birthday visit and a barbecue. I normally don’t discuss politics since I’m the only conservative in the family and value family far above winning any kind of political argument. On the way back from Essex and a fantastic fried clam lunch, the younger one, age 29, told me with great sincerity, that the Northeast had the best record and best handling of the pandemic in the entire country. He works 11 hour days as a chef, unwinds playing cards, and has absolutely no interest in politics. I just rolled my eyes and let it go. Just how dishonest is the press in New York? This is unbelievable.
Here in Washington, people between 20 and 39 account for 39% of all positive cases and 1% of the deaths. People 80+ account for 5% of all positive cases and 51% of the deaths. This courtesy of our state’s Dept. of Health website. It says about everything you need to know.
Adding to what Estoy Listo said, people 60+ account for 89% of all deaths in Washington state. No one under 19 has died from the virus.
I mention young people, because the school district in my rural community of 26,000, in a rural county of 100,000 is attempting to re-open all the schools with a plan involving in-person, hybrid of two days in-person and the rest on-line and then all on-line. Parents are given the option of choosing which they want.
The pushback is pretty striking and pretty much follows political lines.
What is making this controversial is our county Health District Officer has sent a letter recommending the district only offer on-line learning. Here’s where it gets controversial. Our county is one of the agricultural counties that relies on migrant labor, mostly in the orchards, and our confirmed case rate has steadily been rising. The latest the health department lists is 551 new cases/100,000 over a 14 day period. That just under 40/day average. While that’s a large increase over the last two months (trending upward), hospitalizations and fatalities haven’t risen at anything close to the trends. Our hospitals have plenty of capacity to handle a surge, and their have been 15 deaths, one under age 50, and the rest over 50.
The Health Officer told the school board he would only allow in-person classes when the new case rate was below 75, which means 5 new cases a day. The Health Officer surmises the rise in new cases is from young people, which explains why there hasn’t been the rise in hospitalizations and deaths.
The school board is adamant they’re going to open the schools. As I’ve debated the issue with people, pointing out that younger people (elementary school age) don’t easily become infected and don’t easily transmit the virus, but to no avail. I’ve been asked how many teachers I want to murder.
When asked by the school board why he won’t just issue a health order not to open the school if he’s so adamant they shouldn’t open with in-person classes, his response was, “I can’t close you down until you open.” He did say if there are two positive covid tests in a cohort, unrelated, in a 14 day period he would close that school.
As far as I can tell, there is one other school district in the county attempting to open with in-person classes, and this is a district that is in the area where new cases are “surging”.
So, yes the fear is mostly real– though some is political, and along the conservative/liberal divide.
For anyone interested, here’s the European CDC report on the effects of reopening schools. The conclusion, no large outbreaks in schools, no evidence that there was community spread from the school, in fact, it was more likely that adults brought the virus into the school.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/COVID-19-schools-transmission-August%202020.pdf
A lot of people definitely have a skewed view of the risk.
People say “how dare you tell me not to be afraid of a deadly virus!” Well, a lot of viruses are “deadly” in the sense that they could kill you. It doesn’t mean they will kill you.
I saw a doctor on a LinkedIn thread say that your chances of dying from COVID-19 were greater than dying in a car accident. Just based on the sheer number of deaths, completely leaving out the average person’s risk. A doctor! An educated person!
It’s ridiculous.
Pingback:Strange Daze