The Media’s Connection to Coronosophobia
October 25, 2020
It’s been fascinating to watch how different modes of managing one’s own health risks have played out in 2020. Before the pandemic, the only insights we had into this calculation were health plan elections - how do we evaluate and act on the tradeoffs between premiums and costs at point-of-service when choosing among a menu of health plan options - and general lifestyle risks such as drinking, smoking, and choosing to wear a seat belt.
Living through the pandemic has afforded a whole new perspective to the term “risk”. Everyone has had to make decisions on how much exposure to the risk of infection they’re willing to subject themselves in exchange for a semblance of ‘normalcy’, including seeing friends and family and sending children to school. In the beginning, when little was known about how the virus was transmitted and the fatality of the virus, most people agreed that the most rational thing to do was to hunker down and wait for our scientists, epidemiologists. and researchers to provide guidance on how to live with the virus in a safe manner.
And they have! So much has been learned in the last six months, and we now know that the case fatality rate is less than 0.5% (higher for those over age 69), compared to a fatality rate of 0.1% for the flu. We also know that children are not spreaders of the virus, which should eliminate the debate around whether children should go back to school.
New research has found few links between in-person K-12 schooling and COVID-19 case rates. "There is not a consistent pattern," one study au
Unfortunately, too many people are still behaving similar to the early days of the pandemic, when we didn’t know much. The general sentiment is to let everyone live their lives, and make their own decisions. And I disagree with this perspective, as I see this situation as one of self-harm. Rates of suicide, depression, anxiety and drug abuse are way up, and many believe it’s due to self-induced isolation and fear of getting ill.
I posit that members of our society are suffering from a phobia, which is “a persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous.” There’s even a phobia specific to the fear of contracting a disease, called nosophobia. This could explain why some parents continue to lock-down their children and not send them to school, and some healthy thirtysomethings are still holed-up in their homes, in spite of the evidence that this lifestyle is not necessary to manage their risks of contracting the virus. And it will do more harm than good. Compelling data is not always enough to facilitate rational decision-making.
There’s no clear evidence on what causes phobias, but if we were to rename nosophobia to be specific to COVID-19 (coronosophobia?), I’m fairly confident we could tie its origins to the media. They’ve successfully whipped-up fear and frenzy, and continue to do so instead of choosing to highlight how far we’ve come in bringing down the fatality rate. Thus I believe a strong argument can be made that our media has been a danger to public health, and should be held accountable for helping individuals get on with their lives in a safe, rational manner.
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