Linked is a fascinating dataset showing exactly what you are talking about. The average american thinks if they get covid, their odds of dying from it around 10%. In younger age brackets this is almost 1000x wrong.
People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This makes it almost impossible to have rational, grounded discussion of public policy. If everybody is walking around thinking covid is a death sentence, of course they will beg of all the crap we are doing right now.
There have been a bunch of surveys similar to this that are all strong evidence of how disgraceful the messaging has been from politicians, health departments, media, etc. But the real problem with surveys like this are asking people what the "average" chance of death or hospitalizations are. We know that the risk from COVID are highly stratified by things like age and obesity and pre-existing conditions, so "average" is wildly inadequate as a measure to describe the real world. A statistics course explaining the difference between normal and Pareto distributions would go a long way in bringing many people back to reality. Alas...
I just recently recovered from a breakthrough case (double jab Moderna) and the fear was absolutely the worst part. You scrutinize every breath. Check your oxygen constantly. Sit around wondering if tomorrow is the day you go to the ER. Or maybe it’s day 10. Sit around completely isolated from friends and family wracked with a fever and try not to lose your mind.
Of course. The conspiracy guys has been the ones who have been correct through this pandemic, predicting every escalation, and the coming response.
If you are someone intelligent who wants to know about covid for real, you should read the conspiracy subreddit on reddit and also turn off the TV news. That's the actual truth, but people can't take it.
I remember last year, before the US elections, some of the conspiracy guys said "Just watch, after the election COVID will magically go away. This was all a ploy to make Trump look bad.". Others said "COVID will be around forever, the government will never give up emergency powers".
I could conclude that the latter camp was correct. Or that when you have competing versions of conspiracy theories, predicting different outcomes, one of them will always appear to be prescient after the fact. Then you can ignore the others that didn't pan out, and say that everything that's happened so far has been predicted by the conspiracy guys.
Line of reasoning doesn't seem to account for ICU occupancy levels & reduces outcomes to simply "lived" vs "died" without looking at sub-outcomes under "lived" category.
You're right. There is more nuance. For instance, many of the concerns about "long COVID" are legitimate.
But even within the nuance the statistics are being used to support narratives that aren't always honest. Just look at the news that apparently 40-45% of COVID hospitalizations are actually people who were admitted for another reason and just so happened to test positive upon admission.
The article references two studies. One was looking at pediatric populations and the other adult populations:
> The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.
> The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
> This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.
Knowing that almost 50% of the hospitalizations in both children and adults that are classified as COVID hospitalizations aren't really for COVID totally obliterates the narrative in the media about how (mostly unvaccinated) COVID patients are overwhelming the hospitals.
People are very, very badly misinformed about their risks for covid. This makes it almost impossible to have rational, grounded discussion of public policy. If everybody is walking around thinking covid is a death sentence, of course they will beg of all the crap we are doing right now.
https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/