To wonder why people can't evaluate risk?

[2155User]

Seeing so many posts of people asking opinions on whether they should go on holiday/go away and a huge proportion of responses are "it's too risky" "don't go something might happen" etc

Yet the chances of catching the virus are pretty similar near identical to the chances of dying in a car crash/dying from falling over etc.

So AIBU in thinking people have totally lost the ability the evaluate the risk out there?

Obviously it'll differ if you have medical conditions that make you at higher risk of catching the virus, and quite clearly a holiday is a 'choice'/luxury but still, people just seem scared

Your risk is not my risk.

Your risk might be "as long as I don't die I'm fine".

Mine is "I have two small children who are incapable of caring for themselves. Two weeks of trying to care for them single-handedly while suffering from a flu-like illness which might very possibly see me confined to bed for days at a stretch might actually put them in danger as well as traumatising them".

And yes, I get a flu jab for the same reason. And most other illnesses there is other help available (if only a mother from school picking them up to go in) because you're not actually quarantined for two weeks away from your support network.

If I get it while being careful I get it. But I'm not courting it by getting on a plane to go to a country which currently has quite a high caseload, thanks.

@Chicchicchicchiclana

I read the necessary news, I don't avoid it all, but I don't think it's healthy to watch the news updates 10 x a day and have it drummed into your from all angles that there is a virus and people are dying.

I'm not quite sure why you're taking issue with my positive outlook. Like my previous responses have shown, I do take this seriously, but I'm allowed to view as much as I can as 'glass half full' as it'll mentally keep me in a better state

From an ER doctor near me in Virginia, USA. I'm not sure how much outcomes vary in the UK compared to the US but I think recovery times for hospitalised cases are similar in the UK so the risk assessment includes not just will I die but will I be ill for months and who will take care of my job/family etc while I am recovering.

"Focusing on mortality is not the whole story. I also get asked a lot about long term complications from COVID. First, let’s talk about how dangerous getting COVID is now and the impact COVID can have on you as a patient who survives. 10-15% of patients end up in the hospital, 2-5% of patients end up in the ICU, and 10-15% of hospitalized patients die.

Overall mortality is likely around 1% when you factor in asymptomatic and untested patients, but we don’t know. Currently, mortality still represents 3-4% of positive cases.

Sir William Osler is often credited for being the father of modern medicine. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, “he who knows syphilis, knows medicine.” As a Hopkins resident in the 90’s, walking the halls of Osler, I often felt that to know AIDs, was to know medicine. The same will likely apply to COVID as it can literally impact any and every organ in your body. So, it’s hard to say exactly what long term complications patients will have 5 to 10 years after diagnosis since the virus has only been around 8 months.

From a recovery point of view, a good rule of thumb is a week of recovery for each day you’re in the ICU. Many ICU stays are 14-21 days. That’s 3-5 months to recover to baseline (if you actually return to full baseline strength) while you’re likely not working or able to perform your previous day to day activities. For routine 7-10 day hospitalizations, expect recovery times of 1-2 weeks at a minimum.

Some complications involve blood clots, stroke, kidney failure, and heart issues which can have long term complications. Likely, we will find long term sequelae from heart, lung, kidney, and brain damage but time will tell."

@swg1

I agree that everyone's circumstances will change their view of the risk.

And interesting that you mention the flu jab as that is something I would never get unless I was older/had underlying medical issues etc.

But I do wonder at what point does someone like you say "that risk is low enough for me for me to partake?" Where is 'your line'?

@ACrashInTheNines

We've had/are having risk evaluation bred out of us as a species

I don't think it's ever really been there. I reckon evolution has programmed into us to be afraid of the immediate danger and not much else
We're instinctively afraid of infection, and it's pretty much all that's been in the news lately. Hence, we've allowed ourselves as a nation to stop screenings and treatments for diseases we do have a chance of saving people from, and we've pitched ourselves into an economic disaster that will ultimately cost more lives than our response to covid ever saved, if it indeed saved any at all.
All do to monkey-brain levels of risk assessment ability.

I don't think you understand why treatments stopped.

Treatments stopped because while the covid-19 incidence was high it was too dangerous to continue them. One person taking it onto a chemo ward could wipe out the whole ward - and some of those people could live a significant amount of time without chemo.

If you want treatments to resume we all have to work on being unselfish and keeping the numbers down regardless of our personal risk level.

Around 2000 people die from rtas in the UK each year. Since March, so 4 months, around 45,000 have died with COVID and excess deaths have been around 65,000. And that’s with all the factors put in place to mitigate its impact. I don’t think it really helps to make the comparison. And, as others have said, it’s about considering public health and the welfare of the vulnerable (family members and society in general). It’s about the potential for disruption versus the possible enjoyment. It’s about not trusting a government who on the same day gives VAT breaks to fast food firms to boost consumption and the economy, but tells us we all need to lose weight in order to save the NHS during the second wave.

2155User - keeping yourself in a mentally better state is absolutely fine, of course, please go for it.

But that doesn't mean you can alter facts and tell people who disagree with you that they "can't evaluate risk".

You are just determined to talk yourself into justifying your holiday. All fine, but don't make yourself out to be intellectually superior to hundreds of thousands of other people. This is what is embarrassing.

@2155User

You could spend money in your local area to stimulate the economy. Again look at the USA. They didn't want the economy to suffer so opened back up and cases are surging.

Yes, a walk in the park is a risk, but a far lower one than going to an airport, taking flight and staying in another country, buying food from local shops etc.

If you want to go abroad go abroad. Don't feel you have to say others cannot gauge risk to justify your decision.

[quote 2155User]@swg1

I agree that everyone's circumstances will change their view of the risk.

And interesting that you mention the flu jab as that is something I would never get unless I was older/had underlying medical issues etc.

But I do wonder at what point does someone like you say "that risk is low enough for me for me to partake?" Where is 'your line'?[/quote]
We're doing more now. We're doing parks daily. The kids are booked onto summer day camp in a couple of weeks. But all of those are done by literally assessing risk - not just going "it'll be fine" but asking for how they are running things, checking local numbers, and so on. Same as if I were sending them to a day camp in normal times I'd check they weren't leaving my kids unsupervised.

But bear in mind I've spent significant amounts of time over the last three years around cancer patients which means I've probably got a rather more dire view of how bad "sick but not sick enough to be hospitalised" can be. I suspect a lot of mumsnet believes anything not bad enough to be hospital can be shaken off by talking to yourself sternly and trying really hard. It can't. We have a plan should I get it despite all reasonable precautions which involves my bubble-family but honestly, I suspect there will be people without that support network where things might get very dire, particularly as social services are stretched to breaking point :( Later there may well be stories of kids hurting themselves because the parent saw no choice but to battle alone alone and sick in quarantine and then fell asleep.

If you want treatments to resume we all have to work on being unselfish and keeping the numbers down regardless of our personal risk level

If I want treatments to restart?! They should never, EVER have been stopped, and I don't think you understand the reason that they were. Lobbing COVID+ patients into carehomes FULL of the vulnerable elderly was a sure fire way to get loads of people killed (and it did) but the NHS did precisely that.
There was also no reason to stop screenings.
Risking the lives of people with diseases we could treat in case they caught one we couldn't (which the vast majority survive anyway) was a travesty which will cost many more lives than it supposedly saved.
Lockdown suppor tees have blood on their hands, as far as I'm concerned.

I don’t think people are scared of virus to not go on holiday, probably more scared that a local lockdown could cause them to lose a lot of money, certainly is in our case, that is why we are on holiday in our touring caravan rather than abroad somewhere, and having a lovely time as well.

It's difficult to assess the risk of something we can't see , especially when the available information about it changes frequently.

People in general are terrible at risk assessment. It's not just with Covid, it's with all kinds of things. People are scared of things that are tiny risks, and not scared of things that are hugely risky. Driving being the #1example of the latter.

For a while locally to me there was a big hullabo about joggers being a risk for spreading Covid, until some doctor actually crunched the numbers, including considering things like people in care homes aren't joggers, and found the risk of even passing a jogger with Covid was miniscule.

I think two things mainly drive this. One is that our brains assess risk based on how often we "see" something to be risky. That works if you are basing it on your local community, which is what your lizard brain believes you are doing. But we don't - we see crazy things in the news and on television that happen worldwide. In fact sometimes we see things that are fiction, but it still increases our sense of something being risky.

So our intuitive risk assessment functions have been seriously compromised. And telling everyone that there is a scary disease out there and they must stay home or else ramps that right up.

The other reason is that we now tend to want to assign blame when something goes wrong, even if it's something really out of our control. If your kid breaks an arm, it's your fault for not having prevented it. It comes out of a very risk adverse culture that often forgets to weigh the risk against the disadvantages or not doing something - so we stop our kid playing at the playground but don't think about the developmental or health problems that might be associated with that choice. It's all about the liabilities.

Parental guilt in particular is huge around this.

AIBU To wonder why people can't evaluate risk? I think really YABU because what you are really complaining about is that people don’t share your evaluation of risk, which is just plain silly.

@ACrashInTheNines

If you want treatments to resume we all have to work on being unselfish and keeping the numbers down regardless of our personal risk level

If I want treatments to restart?! They should never, EVER have been stopped, and I don't think you understand the reason that they were. Lobbing COVID+ patients into carehomes FULL of the vulnerable elderly was a sure fire way to get loads of people killed (and it did) but the NHS did precisely that.
There was also no reason to stop screenings.
Risking the lives of people with diseases we could treat in case they caught one we couldn't (which the vast majority survive anyway) was a travesty which will cost many more lives than it supposedly saved.
Lockdown suppor tees have blood on their hands, as far as I'm concerned.

Hi. Buried my husband a year ago due to cancer. Buried my mother due to cancert a year before that. Extremely at home with the conditions under which chemotherapy is and isn't safe because actually, yes, I've had to sit with family members and risk assess that and make that call with them. Also at home with other reasons why just diagnosing cancer can be dangerous - my husband's life was likely considerably shortened due to a biopsy that went horribly wrong. That + covid running rampant and we'd probably have lost him several months before we did.

Which is exactly why I would support lockdown if it would get back to being able to run treatments safely faster. I'll agree with you on screenings, but if I were sitting with a relative and we were where we were in April and we were asked if we wanted to do treatments then the answer would have been "no, no and no again".

I realise you may be suffering from your own grief here, but please really seriously think about that last sentence and how incredibly hurtful it is.

I think part of the problem is the difference between individual risk and societal risk. Boris wants everyone in London to cycle rather than use public transport because on a societal level that is beneficial and will reduce the spread of Covid. But on an individual level for most healthy people, it is far more risky to start cycling in central London when you are not used to it than to get on a tube and risk Covid .

@Chicchicchicchiclana

What other issues are there that have caused the excess death rate to spike so high? Please enlighten us.

A lot of those excess deaths will be due to Covid but a lot of them will be due (indirectly) to the lockdown - caused by the strain on the NHS, failures by patients to seek medical help for things like heart attacks and strokes, cancellations of screenings, domestic violence, suicides, etc.

Plus we had a very mild flu year this year, so excess deaths were lower than average before the pandemic started. In other words, Covid killed some of the elderly people flu hadn’t killed this year.

Nothing is simple.

@Itisbetter

Not at all, I'm sorry that you're viewing the thread like that.

I think it's brilliant that people all think and see things differently, but I do think it's sad when people don't feel able to do things because of the posed risk which is actually very very minimal.

Likewise @Fluffymulletstyle @Chicchicchicchiclana I'm not quite sure why you feel this thread is some way or justify a holiday is absolutely fine for me. A majority of posters haven't viewed it like this, in fact you're the only ones that have, so maybe you've got the wrong end of the stick?

It's more, as the general discussion has been but clearly you've not read properly, that lots of people have a very poor understanding of the current risk involved in many things and as a result are 'missing out' on things which are really absolutely fine.

@Monkeynuts18

Interestingly, I have tried to read more into something similar, in the most simplistic way 'who would have died anyway' from flu etc. Obviously we will never know, but it does make for interesting reads

I really couldn't be bothered with going abroad this year, too many things that could go wrong and insurance might not cover it.

I agree that a lot of people don't seem to be able to evaluate risk when it comes to covid. What I have noticed is that all the people that I know who are following the guidelines to the letter and who are nervous to get back to normal life fit into three categories, those who are either very vulnerable or have someone very vulnerable living with them, naturally anxious people and martyrs. For martyr's, this pandemic has been like all of their Christmases have come at once IMO.

@Mummabeary

That's a really great point! Quite difficult to decide who should get the 'priority' as such and how 'selfish' to be when making decisions or whether you should only ever think about society as a whole

I realise you may be suffering from your own grief here, but please really seriously think about that last sentence and how incredibly hurtful it is.

I stand by it. No personal tragedy justifies what's been done.
Lockdown supporter?
Blood. On. Your. Hands.

I agree that people are rubbish at evaluating risk.

But for me, one of the key things I like about holidays abroad is the anticipation. I just couldn’t get excited right now about the possibility of hassle at the airport, masks on the plane, attractions or restaurants being closed, other people’s fear, not being able to get insurance cover, last minute cancellations or being stranded somewhere and not being able to speak the language. It just doesn’t sound relaxing to me, I’ll stay local this year and save the money for a holiday when things are a bit more certain.

[quote 2155User]@Mummabeary

That's a really great point! Quite difficult to decide who should get the 'priority' as such and how 'selfish' to be when making decisions or whether you should only ever think about society as a whole[/quote]
And bear in mind too that people will have other things going on that influence them in that.

My thinking is that if it was a year ago and my husband was ill I would have done almost anything to get people to obey the restrictions for his sake. It would be incredibly hypocritical for me to start breaking them now just because it's someone else's husband at risk.

I’m not sure what to say here .
We have lost a close family member to Covid and have learned of two further cases , fairly close to us, of deaths due to Covid.
We have never experienced anyone dying due to flu or a road accident.
Maybe that’s just a coincidence of statistics but it’s certainly rattled our cage.