Irrational Covid Fears

[maestrob]

Why do so many vaccinated people remain fearful? Listen to the professor’s story.


By David Leonhardt
April 19, 2021, 6:24 a.m. ET


Guido Calabresi, a federal judge and Yale law professor, invented a little fable that he has been telling law students for more than three decades.

He tells the students to imagine a god coming forth to offer society a wondrous invention that would improve everyday life in almost every way. It would allow people to spend more time with friends and family, see new places and do jobs they otherwise could not do. But it would also come with a high cost. In exchange for bestowing this invention on society, the god would choose 1,000 young men and women and strike them dead.

Calabresi then asks: Would you take the deal? Almost invariably, the students say no. The professor then delivers the fable’s lesson: “What’s the difference between this and the automobile?”

In truth, automobiles kill many more than 1,000 young Americans each year; the total U.S. death toll hovers at about 40,000 annually. We accept this toll, almost unthinkingly, because vehicle crashes have always been part of our lives. We can’t fathom a world without them.

It’s a classic example of human irrationality about risk. We often underestimate large, chronic dangers, like car crashes or chemical pollution, and fixate on tiny but salient risks, like plane crashes or shark attacks.


One way for a risk to become salient is for it to be new. That’s a core idea behind Calabresi’s fable. He asks students to consider whether they would accept the cost of vehicle travel if it did not already exist. That they say no underscores the very different ways we treat new risks and enduring ones.

I have been thinking about the fable recently because of Covid-19. Covid certainly presents a salient risk: It’s a global pandemic that has upended daily life for more than a year. It has changed how we live, where we work, even what we wear on our faces. Covid feels ubiquitous.

Fortunately, it is also curable. The vaccines have nearly eliminated death, hospitalization and other serious Covid illness among people who have received shots. The vaccines have also radically reduced the chances that people contract even a mild version of Covid or can pass it on to others.

Yet many vaccinated people continue to obsess over the risks from Covid — because they are so new and salient.


‘Psychologically hard’

To take just one example, major media outlets trumpeted new government data last week showing that 5,800 fully vaccinated Americans had contracted Covid. That may sound like a big number, but it indicates that a vaccinated person’s chances of getting Covid are about one in 11,000. The chances of a getting a version any worse than a common cold are even more remote.

But they are not zero. And they will not be zero anytime in the foreseeable future. Victory over Covid will not involve its elimination. Victory will instead mean turning it into the sort of danger that plane crashes or shark attacks present — too small to be worth reordering our lives.

That is what the vaccines do. If you’re vaccinated, Covid presents a minuscule risk to you, and you present a minuscule Covid risk to anyone else. A car trip is a bigger threat, to you and others. About 100 Americans are likely to die in car crashes today. The new federal data suggests that either zero or one vaccinated person will die today from Covid.

It’s true that experts believe vaccinated people should still sometimes wear a mask, partly because it’s a modest inconvenience that further reduces a tiny risk — and mostly because it contributes to a culture of mask wearing. It is the decent thing to do when most people still aren’t vaccinated. If you’re vaccinated, a mask is more of a symbol of solidarity than anything else.

Coming to grips with the comforting realities of post-vaccination life is going to take some time for most of us. It’s only natural that so many vaccinated people continue to harbor irrational fears. Yet slowly recognizing that irrationality will be a vital part of overcoming Covid.

“We’re not going to get to a place of zero risk,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, told me during a virtual Times event last week. “I don’t think that’s the right metric for feeling like things are normal.”

After Nuzzo made that point, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University told us about his own struggle to return to normal. He has been fully vaccinated for almost two months, he said, and only recently decided to meet a vaccinated friend for a drink, unmasked. “It was hard — psychologically hard — for me,” Jha said.

“There are going to be some challenges to re-acclimating and re-entering,” he added. “But we’ve got to do it.”

And how did it feel in the end, I asked, to get together with his friend?

“It was awesome,” Jha said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/brie ... e=Homepage

[Holden Fourth]

A good article and I particularly like the automobile accident analogy.

I've been posting similar thoughts along the lines of "We are going to have to be proactive not reactive and accept the fact that this isn't going away' on social media for a while now. The reaction from the majority has been similar to that noted in the article. People don't see why we should put anyone at risk in any way whatsoever. Instead, we should just lock ourselves away, close our eyes and pretend that it's going to vanish eventually.

As a teacher of physical education I know that every practical lesson I do with a class comes with the knowledge that someone may get injured in my lessons. Put a group of people into a situation where they are asked to be physically active, add in equipment and something will eventually happen. (Fortunately this is rare and injuries are minor or less because with this in mind I take all the precautions that I can to make the lesson content, environment and use of equipment as safe as I can). Before the lesson starts I might emphasise to the class an aspect of safety that I can see but can't totally eliminate. However, this will not necessarily stop some child from ignoring the safety principles and do something thoughtless - it's the nature of the beast. Does this mean that we should no longer do physical education in schools? Does this mean that all organised sport should be done away with? I think you know the answer to that and you can draw comparisons with what the author has stated in the article.

I've just posted this article on FB. It will be interesting to see what reactions I get though I think I know.

[jserraglio]

Fearing Covid is not irrational. I fear it mightily yet try to behave rationally. There’s quite a distance between the one extreme of locking yourself away and the opposite irrational course of not taking this virus seriously, thereby putting yourself and others at risk.

I’ve continued to teach school in person thruout two waves of this epidemic with exposure to hundreds of children and dozens of adults every workday, so I hardly locked myself away. But far too many Americans (including Donald J. Hydroxychloroquine) chose to play fast and loose with CDC guidelines from Memorial Day, 2020 onward, with disastrous results—we will be closing in on 600,000 dead by Memorial Day, 2021.

By comparison, the Flu Pandemic of 1918, well before the advent of modern vaccines and antibiotics, killed 675,000, although it should be noted that total was out of a much smaller total U.S. population, thus it had a more devastating impact.

[Holden Fourth]

I'm in a different position to you as I don't fear Covid. Like you, I went to school every day to look after the children of parents who simply had no choice but to keep on working. It's also quite possible that I've contracted Covid at some stage and because the symptoms were virtually non-existent I didn't notice. My oncologist agrees with me.

My confidence is based on my rugged immune system (I don't get the flu or colds or the annual bout of gastro that goes around. Despite my age I'm fit, healthy and don't have any comorbidities. At the same time I respect that others are not in the same position as me and I follow social distancing rules, etc.

Anyway, the article talks about fear of Covid despite the vaccine. I will happily line up for the jab regardless of which type it is. The government is talking about speeding up process for over 50s and will meet this week replan the rollout.

[jserraglio]

I am at high risk, my immune system pretty much shot. Yet I feel safe at my school due to the rational precautions it has taken.

I am also among the group who have fear of Covid despite having received the vaccine. I have been fully protected by the Moderna vaccine since early March but have not dropped my guard, due to the spread of variants in Ohio by a group of cretinous Maganderthals who mistake irresponsibility for freedom. I double-mask when out of my house and avoid large gatherings, except at school where strenuous preventive measures are in place. I see my grandson and daughter often but wear a mask. In other words, follow the CDC guidelines.

Life is good. I am in no great hurry to check out the alternative but am not going to live a hermetic existence either.

[maestrob]

I am at high risk, my immune system pretty much shot. Yet I feel safe at my school due to the rational precautions it has taken.

I am also among the group who have fear of Covid despite having received the vaccine. I have been fully protected by the Moderna vaccine since early March but have not dropped my guard, due to the spread of variants in Ohio by a group of cretinous Maganderthals who mistake irresponsibility for freedom. I double-mask when out of my house and avoid large gatherings, except at school where strenuous preventive measures are in place. I see my grandson and daughter often but wear a mask. In other words, follow the CDC guidelines.

Life is good. I am in no great hurry to check out the alternative but am not going to live a hermetic existence either.

We do the same, Joe & Holden. All while avoiding restaurants for now, even though the CDC has reassured the public that the vaccine is currently very effective against all the variants discovered so far. We got our first haircuts last week since last March, but we're still cautious about possibly becoming unwitting asymptomatic carriers until NYC's positive testing rate goes down substantially to near zero, as has happened in Israel, where people have now been told that it's safe to put away their masks, finally.

As with the flu, the danger will never drop to zero, but it will drop to a level that I'm prepared to live with quite soon. Until then, we'll continue to be cautious.

[Rach3]

I am also among the group who have fear of Covid despite having received the vaccine. I have been fully protected by the Moderna vaccine since early March but have not dropped my guard, due to the spread of variants in Ohio by a group of cretinous Maganderthals who mistake irresponsibility for freedom.

Agreed. Here is one of the Maganderthals:

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/ted-nuge ... 44490.html

[maestrob]

I am also among the group who have fear of Covid despite having received the vaccine. I have been fully protected by the Moderna vaccine since early March but have not dropped my guard, due to the spread of variants in Ohio by a group of cretinous Maganderthals who mistake irresponsibility for freedom.

Agreed. Here is one of the Maganderthals:

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/ted-nuge ... 44490.html

It used to be that you could be an a-hole without putting others in danger, even if you were a danger to yourself.

No more.

In Florida, Maganderthal Republicans have made it ILLEGAL for businesses and schools to require vaccination in order to be admitted. People will die because of this policy.

I firmly believe that this new law is unconstitutional, but what can be done?

Don't know what to do with my frustration, except to stay away and boycott Florida products.