Do You think Covid Is Over?
People Are Not Rational About Risk Calculations. So What Does Move Them?
A few days ago when I went next door to feed the feral cats that stay around the abandoned house I practically stepped on this guy on the leaves. I yelled for my husband but noticed that the snake did not seem to be moving. It turned out it was already dead from a bite to its head, almost certainly from one of the cats next door. My husband warned me that the snake, which was about two feet long, might have had babies in the area. The bright colored bands made me think that it might be in the krait family, which are highly venomous.
The experience had me pondering the fact that humans are very poor at personal risk calculations. As I mentioned in my last post regarding google trends data, people are over Covid in the sense that they are no longer looking up things related to this term. Meanwhile there’s rising concern about the BA5 variant, people are still dying suddenly all over the world from something, and there’s a looming food crisis.
One problem I see there is that people tend to overestimate risk to behaviors that they DON’T engage in while underestimating risk from behaviors that they DO engage in. I’ve been warned against foreign travel and staying in Thailand in various ways by various people, almost all of whom never travelled internationally outside of the United States. I’ve known two who were into heroin/fentanyl who expounded on how they would never get on a commercial flight and went on about the dangers of flying. Statistically speaking Thailand is generally safer than the USA is and flying commercially is a lot lot safer than doing heavy opioids.
But people can easily become laser fixated a single event on the other side of the world or manipulated into fearing a virus that presents little to no danger to them (and that’s before they hopefully lower their odds more with real treatment protocols). I’ve heard two or three strange rants about terrorists in Thailand back in the post 9/11 hysteria: you see, there are Muslims in the south of Thailand, and we all know what they do, right? My aunt called me frantically one morning because there was a fire and bombing during the 2006 coup in Bangkok. Apparently it was getting reported on breathlessly on MSNBC at the time. I was in Koh Samui 400 miles away and hadn’t even heard about it. The birds were singing, the sun was shining and everything looked completely normal to me. Half the locals in Chewang didn’t even know about it later in the day. Obviously it didn’t present a statistical risk to me.
The news coverage is very excellent on getting people focused on some far flung thing while ignoring sometimes catastrophic risks in their own area. Two years ago both my mother and I wanted to know why the sky was darkened and there was very low visibility and extremely poor air quality across Las Vegas. I was there and could breathe it, see it, and was very concerned. I checked google, doing several variations of searches related to Sahara dust, news updates today, Las Vegas news et cetera with nothing related to it. I flipped through local radio radio stations which also did not mention it. So we turned on the TV news. I listened to 15 minutes of it before turning that garbage off. "I've heard five or six times today about beaches in Miami being closed for the Fourth of July weekend, bars getting reclosed all over Texas, and about record coronavirus case counts!" I explained to Scotty. "But I can't find a single thing telling me why the sky here is black!" Finally the next morning a radio show explained that there was a fire on Mt. Charleston. They also mentioned air quality was the worst in the Valley in 15 years. Which of these was a greater statistical risk to us? Don’t worry about the fire nearby please stay in your home and watch this news about covid case counts in Florida. Be very afraid of what we tell you to be afraid of. Ignore what we tell you to ignore.
Of course risk is also related to personal choices and not equal for everyone in every situation. The opiod user who is frightened of getting on an airplane is unlikely to die in an airplane crash, just as I am extremely unlikely to die of a heroin overdose (I have never really done drugs and don’t plan on starting). An Australian bush pilot tooling around in his little Cessna who just got his booster shot and is feeling a little off probably has higher chances of dying in a plane crash than either of us. I might find it irrational for someone in Canada to check their toilet for venomous snakes before going to the bathroom, say, but if you live where I do in Thailand, on the other hand, it is probably a prudent thing to do.
Snakes can be scary in their ability to come out of absolutely nowhere, so I have studied the basic visual cues for venomous species. Cobras have distinctive hoods, vipers have distinctive heads, and kraits have distinctive colorful and black bands. I also know which hospitals in my area have which antivenim. Since this one was dead it was easy to photograph to get an accurate ID on it, so I posted this picture in the Thailand expats and friends gab group. It turned out that this was a laoitian wolf snake, which is non venomous though sometimes confused with a banded krait. I’m glad I don’t have to go on high alert.
The thing is that once you become an Australian bush pilot or start smoking White China with you friends or live in an area with a lot of venomous snakes you eventually rationalize your higher risk level and it just becomes part of your day to day existence. I believe the lull right now in interest in Covid and sudden jab deaths relates to this. People are learning to live with Covid and with the idea of 17 year olds dying of heart attacks. They may even realize that they could go at any time but don’t want to think about it. They’re also being distracted by all types of shiny new things like wars and the J6 committee and now Roe vs Wade overturned and why is the price of gas so high, why has my flight been cancelled and my card has been declined and why is there no baby formula again?
In that sense people are over Covid. They are beginning to normalize the idea of dying suddenly. But getting back to the idea that most people are unable to make rational risk calculations, I’ll go back to a question in Steve Kirsch’s Pollfish survey, which asked if someone was willing to take a vaccine even if it caused a 5% risk of disability. Some rather insanely high proportion maybe 14% said yes. I am trying to backtrack to the original question, but I haven’t been able to find it yet.
In short people are irrational about risk calculation. This has never been about public health. This brings me to my first ever polling question
Great post, Amy! Very thoughtful and insightful.
I think COVID is probably about where it has been for several months, still infecting people and reinfecting the injected, and I suspect that what GVB is saying is going to happen to some extent.
The Panic meter seems to have very little to do with any of the data and more to do with just holding on to the Emergency power that has been seized. And if COVID doesn't push the compliance needle, I have a cynical sense that they will release something else, or another COVID gain of function virulent strain.
I really think that they are not let this go. They kind of can't for too long b/c people will start to see even more that it was all a Psy Op. And the resistance will probably come down to the US, where the Est. seems ready to pull out all the stops to foment division to keep an organized resistance from coalescing.
Very good question!
No, it certainly is not over.
But one should make a clear distinction between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
The unvaccinated that did not get covid yet, will eventually catch it. But when they react swiftly and use the remedies from one of the Covid Treatment Protocols, it will in worst case be 2-3 days of discomfort, and after recovery they will then be immune for later covid-infections. So for them, covid will then be over.
But for the double/triple/boosted vaccinated it's a totally different story. The jabs have mis-wired, damaged or destroyed their natural immunity, so they will be more prone to catch it as they are as good as defenseless now against any infection. And worse than that: even if they recover from a covid-infection, they will NOT be immune like the unvaccinated, and will catch it again and again, each time worse than the previous one. And then I am not even addressing the continual slow-poisoning by the spike-protein that the jabs did instruct their organisms to produce, and which will result in clotting and clogging of their arteries which will ultimately when fully clogged lead to a stroke or death.
As long as the distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated in how they deal with a covid-infection is not recognized/admitted by the public health authorities, they will keep on imposing the same - and even more stringently applied - restrictions on EVERYBODY. And so even the not at risk recovered unvaxxed will suffer, not from covid but from the restrictions that will be imposed and that will - as the past 1.5 years have shown - will do little or nothing health-wise but are destroying the economic fabric of society and create a climate of fear and resentment.