In a recent post, I discussed the appeal of conspiracy theories. Some of these theories are probably harmless, as with the belief that the government is hiding evidence of alien contact from outer space. In other cases, however, the theories are quite costly.
I’d encourage people to read this twitter thread from a nurse in Texas. He’s a brief excerpt:
And a recent Yahoo article mentions a similar example from South Dakota:
I don’t know how many people share this view, and indeed it is unlikely that people fall neatly into one of two camps. Thus one poll suggested widespread skepticism about Covid was increasing:
In February, a little more than a quarter of U.S. adults believed the coronavirus was being blown out of proportion. Now, that number has risen to nearly 40% of respondents.
However “blown out of proportion” can include both those who see a hoax, and those who correctly understand that the risk is fairly low for younger people. There are degrees of skepticism.
Nonetheless, I’ve see quite a few press reports of people are open to some pretty extreme conspiracy theories about Covid:
The survey conducted earlier this month also asked voters how likely they are to believe that “vaccines for COVID-19 will be used to implant tracking chips in Americans,” another baseless theory that has spread on social media this year.
More than a quarter of voters in the poll, 27 percent, said they thought the statement might be true, while 73 percent said it was likely false.
(Yes, I’m just as frustrated by the vague wording as you are. “Might be”? “Likely”?)
I don’t have any solution to this problem, but I do believe that when issues become politicized the problem often gets worse. On average, people will probably make better choices when we don’t protect them from the consequences of their actions. Treat them like adults and they are more likely to act like adults.
At the same time I understand that there are “externality” issues with a pandemic, so it’s unlikely that the issue will remain completely apolitical.
HT: Razib Khan
READER COMMENTS
Ahmed Fares
Nov 17 2020 at 9:15pm
Quotes from an article by Fred Reed, tongue-in-cheek of course:
“Now consider hydroxyquinone, Cipro, and zinc. These have been shown by numerous studies to be a miracle cure for Covid when used together.
Zinc was once widely used in making flashlight batteries. Anyway, that all the world’s governments, knowing of this proven research, do not launch massive distribution of the miracle cure can only mean that they are all working for Big Pharma.
There is evidence that those advocating the use of zinc want to make us all into Communist flashlight batteries, but even libertarians view this with skepticism. Some fear that the government may force us all to have voltage checks.
Other articles, mostly by actual doctors or men who say they are, point out that we have no way of knowing what is in the vaccines. One insidious possibility is said to be nanoparticles. I don’t know just what these are, but they must be very small, and they are said to migrate to the brain and diminish free will.
Other experts say that vaccines might contain computer chips. These could be used to track us, say some, or others say to control us, making us into socialist slaves. My own theory is that if zinc made us into flashlight batteries, the resulting current could power the chips, but I don’t want to speculate irresponsibly.”
source: https://www.unz.com/freed/bilge-to-the-right-bilge-to-the-left-and-not-a-drop-to-drink/
Ken P
Nov 17 2020 at 11:27pm
Fairly low is probably an understatement for 1:30,000 chance of dying if you are infected and under 19. And I’m sure very few realize that the risk of death is still quite low if you are old as long as you don’t have underlying conditions (out of over 12,000 deaths in people over age 65, only 10 did not have underlying conditions). I bet a poll would find that more than 40% of people overestimate the risk by two or more orders of magnitude. Such a poll would be a more accurate way to understand what people are thinking.
With many of the risk factors being correlated with high blood glucose, I have to wonder if encouraging people to stay home, be sedentary and likely overeating fast food and junk food is really a good strategy. Also, those with undiagnosed blood sugar issues are probably underestimating their individual risk.
Ken P
Nov 17 2020 at 11:31pm
For the ten deaths out of 12,000 point, I meant to state that number is from New York (obviously not country wide deaths). It was posted by a blogger on this site a while back.
Scott Sumner
Nov 18 2020 at 3:32pm
While I don’t dispute your facts, I don’t ever recall meeting someone over 65 that didn’t have at least one underlying condition. I’m sure those people exist, but most people over 65 are probably like me, basically healthy but with at least one underlying condition.
Mark Brophy
Nov 18 2020 at 7:31pm
If you’re over 60 and don’t live in a nursing home, and you contract the virus, your survival rate is 98% regardless of underlying conditions. If you’re not in a nursing home, you’re not very sick. The virus is so feeble that it couldn’t kill Chris Christie despite him being 100 pounds overweight and having asthma, a respiratory disease. He probably has other underlying sicknesses, too. Eating so much food that you gain 100 pounds is an enjoyable way to kill yourself.
Scott Sumner
Nov 19 2020 at 8:31pm
That “feeble” virus killed over 2000 people today, and it will kill over 2000 people tomorrow. And the next day. Some of them will be young and healthy, like the Chinese doctor who blew the whistle on Covid.
Yes, the vast majority of people survive Covid, especially the young, but those experts who warned us back in January that this would be a big deal were right, and those who said “just the flu” turned out to be very wrong. It’s 10 times worse than the flu.
I’m one of those who didn’t expect so many people to die; I thought we’d end up more like Australia. I was wrong.
Tom West
Nov 18 2020 at 12:30am
Well, Ken P is kind enough to provide an example of how the skepticism works. However, my comments are based on my observations of other skeptics, not him.
Most of the skeptics I’ve met haven’t had anyone they know die or be seriously affected by Covid (most people haven’t yet), so it’s easy to quote the reassuring statistics.
And there’s the “underlying conditions” which I have to say I find tends to have a hint of “well, it’s their fault” or “they were going to die anyway”.
At that point, it’s easy for Covid to become something “other people” get, and very easy to start resenting the measures necessary to contain it.
And that simmering resentment makes it ripe for politicization. It hasn’t happened in a widespread way in Canada (the skeptics I know are simply grumbling, but not enraged or paranoid), but in the U.S. there’s a ready-made narrative that this fits nicely into.
And since that narrative is now a lot of people’s entire world-view, Covid-skepticism is now right in the middle of the maelstrom of right-wing discontent. Honestly, I can’t see how it escapes unless (hopefully) Trump wants the credit for ending the pandemic and heavily promotes the vaccine. (In which case suddenly a bunch of others get suspicious and drag their feet.)
Mark Brophy
Nov 18 2020 at 7:34pm
As in Canada, people in the United States aren’t protesting. Germans are protesting in Berlin and are being soaked with water cannons. There are also protests in Britain and Barcelona. The Danes protested against a proposed mandatory vaccine law. YouTube has videos of all these protests.
Ken P
Nov 18 2020 at 1:42am
Tom, I don’t see being numerically accurate as being a skeptic. Underlying conditions is the way to know your risk, and to identify those needing protected. I personally have an underlying condition that puts me at considerably heightened risk and have family members I care about that have even higher risk. I am also concerned (not condescending) about people who cavalierly underestimate their risk as well as those who frantically overestimate their risk. I am especially concerned that millions of people globally will likely starve to death due to disruptions in global supply chains and reduced economic activity.
Tom West
Nov 22 2020 at 4:14pm
<blockquote>Underlying conditions is the way to know your risk, and to identify those needing protected. </blockquote>
Ken, first, my apologies. I know both directly and indirectly people who are permanently affected (including a child), so it’s pretty hard for me not get irate. Your post did not deserve condescension.
My main point is that you cannot separately protect everybody over 65 and half the 50+ year olds. It’s simply not possible – personal protection measures just aren’t all that effective if COVID is endemic (which is why health-care workers either wear top-to-bottom PPE or have astoundingly high rates of infection).
My personal experience with this is in a local old-age home. They’ve now had their fifth outbreak after the initial catastrophic one. There simply are no practical measures that protect, and most of those outbreaks occurred with much lower environmental infection rates than we’re seeing now.
If COVID is running rampant is society at large, then protection or no, many if not most of the vulnerable will get it and hospitalization will become impossible. We’ve seen the scenario in Italy and New York.
Now, I recognize the economic cost is huge, and the emotional cost, especially on the elderly and isolated, is also huge (with parents in their 80’s, I’m very aware of the non-financial costs).
But I think the debate has to be about the costs of control vs. widespread infection through the *entire* population including the vulnerable. Pitting the costs of control vs. an unachievable fiction leads to outcomes that no-one wants.
Mark Z
Nov 18 2020 at 3:59am
This post reminds me of the NPR story about ~25% of people think the sun revolves around the earth and the old surveys saying about the same % think 9/11 was an inside job, in part because of the similarity of the fractions. Scott Alexander suggested a constant (a broader version of the so-called Lizard man constant of 4%) of around 1/3 of people who will basically affirm any conspiracy suggested to them, without even knowing what it is. Apparently many people are habitually extremely suspicious. If you already believe the CIA killed JFK and orchestrated 9/11, why not also make vaccines into tracking devices?
I don’t know, maybe explaining the birthday problem or the ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ is a good rhetorical way to convince people that the background rate for apparent coincidences is higher than one might intuitively think, and that, for example, a few Warren Commission witnesses dying prematurely out of six hundred isn’t actually good evidence for a conspiracy, and maybe dislodge people from this conspiratorial intuition.
Scott Sumner
Nov 18 2020 at 3:35pm
Good point. I recall that quite a few agreed with the claim that there was a government conspiracy to cover up the airliner crash in North Dakota, despite the fact that the airliner did not even crash in North Dakota.
Lliam Munro
Nov 18 2020 at 5:50pm
That’s just what they want you to think.
Scott Sumner
Nov 19 2020 at 8:33pm
Exactly. 🙂
Thomas Hutcheson
Nov 18 2020 at 6:49am
If there were no externality, that a person who becomes infected not only suffers harm, but can (statistically WILL) harm others, there is no public policy issue
Weir
Nov 18 2020 at 9:19pm
There’s something obviously unhealthy in the idea that if Gavin Newsom, for example, comes back from that restaurant with a positive test then that would teach him a lesson and show him the error of his ways, serve him his comeuppance for having flouted the rules. That vindictiveness doesn’t need more encouragement. The news channels have that covered.
People on TV might gloat about him acting like the risks have been “blown out of proportion” but that’s the business they’re in. The TV channels encourage all the least healthy instincts. Anger and hatred, as the South Dakota nurse says. She also claims that her patients “scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA.” Her patients might not feel she’s being entirely accurate or fair when she reports her version of their views.
But that’s what people get from politics and TV. Just because Gavin Newsom thinks restaurants are less dangerous than the official governmental line doesn’t make him a conspiracy theorist. Lumping everything in together and seeing any deviation from your own beliefs as proof of mental illness is, again, what happens when you don’t get out in the open and you don’t try listening with a more sympathetic ear.
TMC
Nov 23 2020 at 2:47pm
Gavin Newsom is the government’s official line. He’s being called out because he’s leading an exaggerated response to the COVID threat, but is a hypocrite because he’s violating his own rules.
David F
Nov 21 2020 at 6:55pm
Actually the Pentagon recently released videos of contact with UFO’s, which they had been withholding. But conspiracy theories are only part of the problem. Even the “baseless” and “extreme” theory that the vaccines for COVID-19 will be used to implant tracking chips in Americans is not so baseless after all, though it is based in misunderstanding: The DOD and HHS did contract with ApiJect Systems, a company that makes pre-filled syringes, for a mass-production supply chain during an emergency, and RFID/NFC tracking is an optional feature of the syringes. But the purpose is to be able to record the time and place of injection, not to inject the chips themselves. Is the erroneous belief entirely out of the realm of possibility though? In a post-Wikileaks world, I would think not.
There are reasons to be skeptical of Jodi Doering’s account, or at least the implications of it. None of the other nurses in the four medical facilities where she works report any encounters with patients who deny the disease. That’s not to say she’s lying, but it does suggest something about how widespread a problem this is.
From David Zweig’s article in Wired: “Perhaps it’s worth considering that Huron Regional Medical Center has seen a total of six Covid-19 deaths to date. Beadle County, where Huron is located, has registered a total of 22 such deaths, 13 of which occurred since August 1. And in Sanborn County, where Doering lives, there’s been one Covid-19 death. It’s certainly possible that the other facilities where Doering works have seen a higher number of fatalities; she may indeed have watched a great many patients die, as so many frontline workers have. But when all we have is one person’s story, it’s hard to know exactly what it means.” Read the article.
https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-isnt-real-as-they-die/
He also mentions the myth about covid parties. The phenomenon appears to be an urban legend, but it was accepted uncritically by major media outlets.
I agree that politicization is a problem, but I don’t think it’s as simple as traditional media vs social media. I think part of that is that everybody is looking for confirmation of their own biases, and sometimes all we have are anecdotes and we’re left wondering how to make sense of them. So a tweet can get blown out of all proportion because it fits a particular narrative. And then we are told it spreads because of Sturgis and Trump rallies, but not because of protests. And it spreads more readily after 10pm, at least in California. Why would anyone believe such preposterous things? Someone is obviously dissembling.
Another problem is the strange nature of the disease itself. Some aren’t even aware they have it; some can’t seem to get over it; some have lifelong effects and suffer a wide variety of symptoms; and of course some die. Elon Musk tested positive and negative on the same day. Apparently in Tanzania a goat and a papaya tested positive. What to make of it all? The disease lends itself to conspiracy theories.
EB
Nov 27 2020 at 1:22am
This story appears to be less than accurate.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-isnt-real-as-they-die/amp
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