https://www.franklintempletonnordic.com/investor/article?contentPath=html/ftthinks/common/cio-views/on-my-mind-they-blinded-us-from-science.html

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For the last six months, we have all read and talked about nothing but COVID-19; how can there be still such a widespread, fundamental misunderstanding of the basic facts?

Our poll results identify two major culprits: the quality of information and the extreme politicization of the COVID-19 debate:

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.

This, sadly, comes as no surprise. Fear and anger are the most reliable drivers of engagement; scary tales of young victims of the pandemic, intimating that we are all at risk of dying, quickly go viral; so do stories that blame everything on your political adversaries. Both social and traditional media have been churning out both types of narratives in order to generate more clicks and increase their audience.

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From a public interest perspective, we believe the top priority should be better information and a less partisan, more fact-based public debate. It is shocking that six months into the pandemic so many people still ignore the basic mortality statistics, with perceived risk driven by political leanings rather than individual age and health. Misperceptions of risk distort both individual behavior and policy decisions.

The fact that a large share of the population overestimates the COVID-19 danger to the young will make a targeted public health response more difficult to agree on. We think it is also likely to delay the recovery, causing a deeper and prolonged recession.

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It's not shocking to me. The media fear mongering blitz has resulted in this

tylercsbn9 said:

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It's not shocking to me. The media fear mongering blitz has resulted in this

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The government response at all levels is just as much to blame, if not moreso. It's been a mess from the very beginning.

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This misinformation also causes another fundamental problem. The policy decision of what activities to keep shut and for how long is a very difficult and consequential one. It requires balancing two opposite effects of uncertain scale: on the one hand the benefits in terms of slowing COVID-19 contagion, on the other hand the harm to the economy and to people's long-term health and livelihoods. This decision is strongly influenced by public perceptions of dangers, not only because politicians are sensitive to the public's concerns but also because politicians are people too, subject to some of the same biases. Our poll results suggest fundamental misperceptions of the risk of death or serious adverse health consequences from COVID-19 could be distorting these decisions.

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From a public interest perspective, we believe the top priority should be better information and a less partisan, more fact-based public debate. It is shocking that six months into the pandemic so many people still ignore the basic mortality statistics, with perceived risk driven by political leanings rather than individual age and health. Misperceptions of risk distort both individual behavior and policy decisions.

The fact that a large share of the population overestimates the COVID-19 danger to the young will make a targeted public health response more difficult to agree on. We think it is also likely to delay the recovery, causing a deeper and prolonged recession.

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The new found ability to create this type of disconnect will be used for emergency national action to address the climate change "threat" in the near future

If humans were good risk assessors, insurance markets wouldn't exist.

I Am A Critic said:

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tylercsbn9 said:

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It's not shocking to me. The media fear mongering blitz has resulted in this

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The government response at all levels is just as much to blame, if not moreso. It's been a mess from the very beginning.

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I'll agree on the government's response i.e. testing. That was a huge failure. I think most everything else has been pretty fair by the federal government.

I put more blame on the media than politicians because they pick and chose which messages have the loudest voice. It's not always the best voice, or a reasonable take.

That is insane, sad, scary.

tysker said:

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If humans were good risk assessors, insurance markets wouldn't exist.

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Wrong.

I'm not surprised. Fear mongering is the media's top selling product.They always cherry pick the most dramatically fearsome metrics and do little to educate the public.

How do we know op's numbers are correct? or the sources?

If it's the fatality numbers are you are concerned about, it states in the graph that the fatality data is from the CDC.

If it's the polling numbers you are concerned about, the article has the survey details linked.

From the article:

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• 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.

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tamc1956ag said:

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Must be accurate and true if a PhD involved

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Instead of being so silly why don't you document and post references that show this data to be false?

tamc1956ag said:

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Must be accurate and true if a PhD involved

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And yet it took you two edits to post this. Ironic.

Ag Natural said:

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What's really sad is the fire that started the panic was fueled by many bad decisions made in NYC back in March. The medical community probably needs to take the blame for that. Its not politicians who decided to put everyone on ventilators. That perceived shortage of beds and supplies caused mass hysteria. It led to old folks being left in their LTC facilities and it led to a nationwide lock down that tanked the economy.

I'd like to see a model that shows how many total deaths we'd have if the treatment choices were better from the beginning. I know it's easy to say nobody could have known... but I don't feel great about giving one group a pass and not others.

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The Governor of NY needs to take the blame for that - the same Governor who pointed at Texas and Florida and tells them they 'botched" the response to COVID at a time when his state had 10X the numbers of deaths that Texas had, with a smaller population.

With regards to ventilators, they didn't kill people. Early on, people were dropping their saturations even without having significant difficulty breathing. Since the Coronavirus was NOVEL, the same parameters for treating hypoxemia and hypoventilation were used to treat patients as would be used with any other viral pneumonia. With time, it became apparent that proning anticoagulating and using other techniques could benefit patients and save many of them from having to go onto a ventilator (which consumes a lot of manpower and expertise and comes with its own set of risks to both the patient and to the provider).

My point is Texags is a social media venue. I was taught to be a critical thinker...

tamc1956ag said:

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Must be accurate and true if a PhD involved

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Or if you can read and understand data.

siclaro said:

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I'm not surprised. Fear mongering is the media's top selling product.They always cherry pick the most dramatically fearsome metrics and do little to educate the public.

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This is the same for both traditional and social media, and IMO this gets lost in the haste to blame all of the "fear porn" on politics. The fact that in the low-attention span and twitter age, the media doesn't really do context anymore just exacerbates this tendency toward irrational fearmongering

Then you add in the multiplier of it being a presidential election year and it cranks things up another notch or two.

tamc1956ag said:

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How do we know op's numbers are correct? or the sources?

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There have been numerous studies, polls, and surveys done which show that Americans greatly misunderstand COVID19. The OP just provides more support for that.

Here's another one: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ec4464f22cd13186530a36f/t/5efcdd3f10bf462e5c8102b8/1593630019832/FINAL_techreport_wave1.pdf

This one shows that respondents, most of whom are younger than 55, believed there was a 34% chance that they would become seriously ill and 22% chance they would die if they got COVID19. Those numbers are only overstated from reality by a factor of more than 100.It's crazy how far removed from reality so many people's perceptions are; it's a total disconnect.

Other surveys and polls have shown that the group who overestimates their risk the most is the younger, under 30 crowd. I ran across another one the other day and will come back and link it if I can find it.

The media, and even the CDC, have reinforced these highly inaccurate views. It's shameful. You have people living in constant fear who should not be, and this irrational fear has been the driving force behind illogical and counterproductive policy decisions.

What it amounts to is almost like a national suicide attempt

Estimating mortality from COVID-19

I'm not so sure that I blame people, or even the media, for a lot of the misunderstanding. Very few of us (myself included) are epidemiologists or statisticians. I just had an argument the other day with one of my PHYSICIAN partners who was trying to tell me that the fatality rate for COVID-19 was over 3%. He was taking Worldometer or some other U.S. data and looking at fatalities divided by positives and coming up with that figure. I had some difficulty in explaining to him that the true figure was closer to about 0.65%, and that the data are significantly skewed because LOTS of people are asymptomatic and will never be tested, yet they have had either asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic infection. If he didn't understand that distinction,.....

China either had millions more cases and hundreds of thousands more deaths and built up herd immunity. Or they shot everyone who had it to eliminate it from their country.

This thing can't be contained like it is otherwise to have their numbers. Even with a full on lockdown. No way are people not coming into the country and potentially spreading if it they don't have some built in immunity, and/or they just simply aren't tracking it daily. Am I wrong here?

As a perspective of how fear is driving college campus decisions:

Approximately 3200 college-aged kids died from vehicle-related fatalities in 2018.

Up to June 17, there were 125 covid-19 deaths in the 15 to 24 age range. If you could narrow that to only 18 to 22 age range, it would be lower, but for comparisons sake let's just extrapolate 125 to a full year.

That's 375 covid deaths vs. 3200 vehicle-related deaths. You're almost 10x more likely to die from a vehicle, riding a bike or scooter on the road, or walking across a cross-walk. Yet all those things are accepted risks that we encounter for our entire life!!!!

None of this is surprising. Most people underestimate how unintelligent the masses in this country and the rest of the world are. Just having a bachelor's degree places you in the top third of educational attainment, and that doesn't necessarily mean you are smart. This is why it is easy for politicians and others to lie and use simplistic sound bites to convince people to support them. Simple lies are easier to sell than complex truths.