Panic Porn vs Reality
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A number to call after every media story on Kung Flu
Yes, scary headlines sell papers and boost television ratings, but I believe this has been a deliberately orchestrated campaign to expand the state’s power.
What’s Your Actual Risk of Dying from COVID?
Americans are misinformed about the risks of COVID. That’s a fact.
Earlier this year, a Franklin Templeton/Gallup study found that when people were asked what “percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized,” more than a third, 35 percent, said the risk was 50 percent. It’s actually somewhere between 1 and 5 percent. As you might expect, political affiliation influences that perception. “Democrats were much more likely to overestimate the harms of COVID-19, according to the Franklin Templeton/Gallup study, with 41% believing over half of coronavirus patients would require hospitalizations, compared to 28% of Republicans.” Republicans were also more likely to correctly estimate risk.
A recent Rasmussen Reports survey also found that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to overestimate the mortality risks of COVID. According to the survey, “Democrats are significantly more likely than other Americans to overestimate the death risk from COVID-19. Twenty-eight percent (28%) of Democrats think more than 10% of people diagnosed with COVID-19 have died from the disease – more than five times the actual mortality rate. Just 14% of Republicans and the unaffiliated believe the COVID-19 mortality rate is over 10%.” The reason for this is likely tied to media consumption, as the survey found that “More viewers of Newsmax (40%) and Fox News (34%) correctly estimated the COVID-19 mortality rate than viewers of CNN (22%) or MSNBC (24%).”
So, what’s the actual mortality rate? What is your risk of dying from COVID? Well, there are a lot of factors, such as comorbidities and vaccination status, but one thing that has been very clear, even from the earliest days of the pandemic, is that this disease affects the older population more than the younger population.
The CDC posts COVID mortality statistics by age range, where you can see that the risk of dying from COVID starts to increase dramatically once you get to the 50-and-over age groups.
