A recent survey by Kekst CNC, a global strategic communications firm, asked a thousand people in each of six countries (Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, the US, and the UK) to estimate the percentage of their fellow citizens who have been infected with COVID-19 and what percentage have died due to the virus.
The findings were summarised as follows:
Despite relatively low incidence rates compared to earlier in the pandemic in most countries (with the exception of the U.S.), people significantly over-estimate the spread and fatality rate of the disease. In Sweden and the UK for example, the public think 6-7% of people have died from coronavirus – around one hundred times the actual death rate based on official figures. And across countries, people think 5-12% of people currently have coronavirus.
The survey also found that Americans and Germans overestimate their countries’ fatality rate by 225 times and 300 times, respectively.
One way to explain these gross over-estimations requires an understanding of the availability heuristic.
Briefly, the availability heuristic is a mental shortcut used to determine the frequency of a given event. For example, in order to estimate how many people die in plane crashes each year, we tend to rely on recent instances of plane crashes that we can recall hearing about in the media (rather than diligently analysing sterile statistics). The availability of such examples informs how dangerous we perceive plane travel to be.1
The media is incentivised to report on rare and novel events because they capture and retain our attention (attention translates to ad-revenue). These events are stored in our memory, available for recall later. The problem is that an abundance of easily available events tends to warp our perception of reality. The more recent and salient instances of an event (e.g. plane crashes, homicides, kidnappings) we accumulate, the more likely we are to hold inflated estimates of a given event’s frequency.
COVID-19 has been the news story of 2020. The public has been marinating in the media’s 24/7 reporting for over eight months. The abundant availability of corona-coverage means that the average person has no problem recalling instances of virus-related deaths. Thus, given our susceptibility to the availability bias, it is not surprising to see people greatly exaggerating the lethality of the pandemic.
Perhaps we need a new heuristic to combat the availability bias; one which reminds us that if an event is receiving lots of media attention, it is probably less common than we think.
Footnotes
- For those curious, 1039 plane casualties were recorded worldwide in 2018. In the same year, 33,654 fatal motor vehicle crashes were recorded in the US, alone.
