Are there studies that compare media coverage with surveys on how people think we die?
> Two kinds of bias were identified: (a) a tendency to overestimate small frequencies and underestimate larger ones, and (b) a tendency to exaggerate the frequency of some specific causes and to underestimate the frequency of others, at any given level of objective frequency
Humans are intuitively better at it. For example, it would be impossible to predict something like 911 event with such frequentist analysis.
Also impossible to predict some sort of nuclear disaster terrorist act that never happened before and could take a million lives.
Another thing to keep in mind is the "missing life" (dying young) and quality of life after disease. That's why something like Alzheimer's seems a lot worse than heart disease.
911 was probably too few deaths to make an impact in the statistics though. You'd need something killing tens of millions of people