There are many articles (I’ve seen two just in passing) where nurses talk about COVID patients going on a ventilator, and begging for the vaccine, only to be told it’s too late.
I feel that most people that are taking risks with COVID (e.g. healthy people not getting vaccinated) either don’t have enough foresight to realize they actually don’t want to be hospitalized/die from this, or they don’t believe the risks are real.
Risk assessment is something many aren’t great at — that is striking a reasonable balance between no fear and too much fear. This is made worse by conflicting opinions and studies, and not being able to discern truth from fiction/sensationalism.
You read about it, I have heard from the witnesses. Some beg, some show fatalist. In fact,
> until they’re bitten
some do not quite realize that it is death involving slow asphyxia we are talking about... Days of drowning, not minutes.
> Risk assessment [...] is made worse by conflicting opinions and studies, and not being able to discern truth from fiction/sensationalism
Which is one of the biggest mess behind e.g. vaccine hesitancy, not to mention not convincing narratives about correct behaviour to prevent spreading.
Anyway, the communicational mess is a disaster, while this reference "fiction" is more problematic. It is not, at this level, something you discriminate easily. When Derek Lowe writes some find him credible, when Robert Malone speaks some find him credible - keys for discrimination are not easily at hand.
That is your opinion. One person’s neurotic is another person’s normal. It’s very hard, maybe impossible, to force-change someone’s perception of risk. Both sides will remain at loggerheads until they accept this.
This seems to be the fundamental disagreement between the ‘anti’ side (anti-mask, anti-vaxx etc) and the ‘pro’ side. The reality is that different people can have vastly different risk tolerances. Some people are ok knowing they could die from a circulating respiratory illness and some simply are not. Some people believe vaccines are risky, others do not.
The challenge is it’s very hard (maybe impossible) to change someone’s personal risk tolerance. Imagine trying to convince someone with a fear of heights to go skydiving. You can state the facts, cite safety figures for parachutes etc but you are still unlikely to get them on a plane.