Is the fear out of proportion?

[Hotlungs]

I’m asking this genuinely as I struggle with anxiety and have a tendency to catastrophise.
I read yesterday that 99.5% of people will survive if they have the virus. Whilst I understand that people are worried they are in the 0.5% is the fear rationale? The press describing it as a ‘killer virus’ and people saying they don’t want to go to the supermarket incase they die. Obviously I’m not talking about those in the vulnerable group.
Are we doing poor risk management? Again to clarify I don’t mean the current lockdown situation to protect the NHS (which is needed) but I mean the fear of it.
We are more likely to die in our cars but we risk manager that (with precautions) to still use them. What are people’s thoughts?

I saw that Sarah Gilbert interview on Marr. She didn’t say you don’t get immunity; she said we don’t know how long immunity lasts, and that with other coronaviruses it’s usually a few years.

I should’ve added that I remain hiv-.

I hate the air of suspicion that is around and can’t wait for people not to need to give each other a wide berth and slightly strained look whenever you pass in the pavement.

This exactly ^ there's a bad atmosphere atm and I don't like it

People's behaviour scares me more than the virus tbh

@nuitdesetoiles, it's nive to hear someone speak like this.

Fwiw, I think that its not just the newspapers and FB. This site has been a nightmare for spreadiong fear amongst everyone, even down to checking on everyone's move "You are allowed to do this but not that', being judgemnetal etc.... You only have to see all the posts going about unnecessary shopping for example

once this goes overall those deaths will continue and likely to be exacerbated by this lockdown and increased poverty kicking in as a result of economic downturn.

This has been. big worry of mine for a few weeks now. I'm happy to see people starting to acknowledge that (incl the human cost -deaths- linked to the fact people dont have acces to healthcare the way we normally do). But I would have liked to see many more tlaks and discussions on what we were doing and why. Rather than knee jeck reactions all the way, incl from our government

@DianneWhatcock, I wish they had talked about physical isolation/distancing.
Talking about SOCIAL isolation/distancing created the problem imo.

@QuestionMarkNow yes that makes sense

I'm sick of going for a run / walk (only once a day and keeping safe distance) and getting judgy glares off people who are ALSO OUT 🤦‍♀️

And don't get me started on people's behaviour in supermarkets

Yes, the fear is totally out of proportion. According to ONS data, if you catch the virus, the risk of an under 40 year old dying is just 1 in 100,000. This all under 40s, including those in higher risk groups.

The screenshot is too small to be legible, but that statistic is nonsense. In the week beginning 3 April, there were 43 deaths under the age of 44. Which would mean 4,400,000 cases that week, just in that age group. That's 7% of the population. Nonsense.

In terms of real life, mum’s lost two friends to it.

If we look at the year going April 19 - 20, so like a tax year, that’s the lowest number of friends she’s lost for ages - because they all started dying off around 80.

She started off being matter of fact but I can hear her fear increasing. She also feels trapped because she dared to stretch her legs to post a letter and had two neighbours phone and ask “why did you do that, I would have done it”. It really is portrayed like the outside world is a series of land mines.

I hate the air of suspicion that is around and can’t wait for people not to need to give each other a wide berth and slightly strained look whenever you pass in the pavement

You should live in a village nr to me!
Family visited by Police after reports they were holding a party with guests!
Turns out it was a family game of Charades!

GoldenOmbre fair enough. I thought it was a reasonable way of trying to make sense of the numbers. Maybe I've read too much Stephen King!

@jasjas1973 I do live in a village

Last weekend I had a neighbour threaten to call the police because I was having a "mass gathering"

If a "mass gathering" means sitting out in my back garden with my household members DH and my 3 dc. then guilty as charged!!

What a fucking muppet. I wish she had have called them just so she got a well deserved bollocking for wasting police time

I was shouted at the other day as I stepped back into someones "zone" I was helping the security guard at the local coop spot where a shoplifter had legged it too.

Get lots of dirty looks when out walking with dcs getting fed up with this now. People are very stuck in their "emotion" brain right now...they're not able to look at pros and cons, weigh up risks, think about the long term all of which require some degree of analytical thinking. It's how propaganda works, appealing to peoples emotions....It's quite worrying how this has affected peoples behaviour all this "name and shame" etc

I just saw one of those dog awful promos from the Home Office “act as if you have coronavirus”.

No wonder some people have lost their minds. It’s going to be extremely difficult to roll back from this messaging.

"We are more likely to die in our car"

Wrong

There were 1,700 road deaths in the whole of last year

There have been 15,000 deaths within a few weeks plus about7,500 deaths in care homes
and an unknown number died in their own homes

Extreme fear of leaving the house, obsessively washing shopping & post,
is OTT unless you are shielded

However, minimising the seriousness of this epidemic is being just as daft in the other direction,
just as bad at statistics

Even if you have no faith in this govt....
All those govenments around the world haven't shut down a hefty chunk of their economy just for shits & giggles

An economy won't trundle along happily as before if ½ million people die,
which was the estimation of the government's advisers at Imperial College if the UK did nothing

20,000 deaths is what they estimated with a lockdown and the UK shouldn't be too much higher than that

Once daily deaths reduce some more to an "aceptable" level,
the government can cautiously and slowly relax most of the measures, reopen schools and restart the economy,
like other countries are beginning to do

Yes. The media and SM in particular have a lot to answer for as they support a feedback loop where all discussion becomes a personalised battleground and people dig into a position and then work themselves into an offended frenzy.
Those prone to anxiety take part in or read those discussions, and understandably get further drawn into the panic. So where the message was 'lockdown to save the NHS', it becomes for some 'lockdown to save us all from the killer virus'; and where there are examples of young or middle aged people dying, that becomes 'anyone can die of this' (true but the risk is very very small for many) which in turn becomes for eg 'my child (healthy) could die of this' (even smaller risk), which becomes 'my child will die of this and selfish people questioning anything to do with lockdown are basically saying they want my child to die'.
It is interesting because it does beg the question of whether, considering how much power over our daily behaviour government and media has, more could not have been done to get to grips with the obesity crisis and the high levels of ill health and early death caused by air pollution. Fear certainly is a motivator with C19 but hasn't been for those more intractable issues.

iamapixie I think the advantage to a pandemic - in terms of govt shitting on rights - is a bigger thing than they could ever get out of potential campaigns re obesity.

Though I shudder to think what’s coming next. They made no effort at all to address overpopulation so we’re all screwed.

Totally agree. The media and the headlines they use are designed and intended to cause fear and panic. They use the same strategy with all types of news. They don't care about the serious anxiety they are causing in so many people.

I wish people would wake up to this and look after themselves by restricting the amount of news they consume and being very careful about the sources from where they obtain it. And ideally go one step further and cross check and verify from a variety of reputable sources.

@BigChocFrenzy it’s not about numbers of deaths though surely? It’s about risk factors of if you contract it versus dying of it/with it? And at the moment that only effects (in the main) certain parts of the population?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be taking it seriously and I think there will be a level of social distancing for a while, which I’ll be happy to do. But for the majority of individuals who get it it won’t mean death. The narrative in the press/online is often that it’s a ‘killer virus’ which has the narrative that if you get it you will definitely die, which just isn’t proven.

@BigChocFrenzy But the modelling for the half a million deaths was done by the same guy who estimated that over 100,000 would die from BSE when in fact 200 did. As you well know, these forecasting models are only as good as the inputs, and even a small error - for example in the death rate - can give dramatic results if you multiply it by 65m (the population). The Imperial college model was not peer reviewed and as far as I am aware the model itself has not been published.

Forecasting is hard and the one rule is that the forecasts are always wrong, the only question is how wrong.

We should be studying Sweden closely. When it looked like Swedish death rates would be high, there were lots of articles on how they were heading for disaster. Now that Sweden also seems to have peaked and is plateauing and possibly even trending down, the commentators are silent.

I think this is why lock down has worked so well here, likely too well and much higher than predicted. We were also taking actions before we even locked down, for example my daughter and I were due to spend a long weekend in central London and cancelled about two weeks before lock down.

People watched the scare stories unravel in other countries, italy being particularly bad, the stories coming out of it, which led to some people being terrified.

I’ve read some awful things on here, one poster claimed she would not let her children die so wouldn’t send them to school someone else was scared to open their windows in case the virus got in, people have predated life will never get back to normal. Or famously one poster thought it would be the start of world war three, For some people it’s really impacted and damaged their mental health.

It is scarey, no one wants to get it, because you don’t know if you’ll be the one who does get seriously ill, and Boris being at deaths door didn’t help, neither did the sight of temporary morgues being set up, and new nightingale hospitals, and every day a run down on the death numbers, with little context of how they stacked up v other causes of death.

But it does need to be balanced in context, as many people are beyond terrified now. Even if lock down ends, they will be too scared to leave their homes or interact with other people and they are passing that fear onto their children.

However hind sight is twenty twenty and we need to remember that. Ultimately we locked down because the public and basically the who demanded it, the government really didn’t have any other choice, because it was a gamble if we didn’t, as at the time we didn’t know enough.

It has however went on long enough now, and by mid may normal life needs to come back and we need to be able to live with this virus, and manage it, not hide in our homes from it,

OP “ The narrative in the press/online is often that it’s a ‘killer virus’ which has the narrative that if you get it you will definitely die, which just isn’t proven.”

Exactly. People seem to be terrified of death, not scared of a pneumonia type illness.

@Bluntness100 Agree with everything you’ve written and really helps get my anxiety in check

Evidence to date is limited on chances of death/life changing health issues from Covid for specific categories of people.

As PPs have highlighted, comparing with other types of risk, eg roads, suicide - 6500 in UK in 2018, shows why people are frightened, in the short term.

The virus has already (directly) killed or hastened the deaths of a lot more people than die in any given year from other, obvious kinds of risks. The process of dying of/with Covid also seems pretty bad.

The UK and international stats on the numbers of deaths are not “scare stories”.

In the UK we don’t have reliable data on no of cases vs deaths, life changing effects, recovery etc. V little testing.