U.S. Adults' Estimates of Covid-19 Hospitalization Risk
news.gallup.com
news.gallup.com
Among Democrat voters, 95% overestimate the hospitalization risk for the unvaccinated, 78% are more than 10x wrong, and 41% of them are 50x wrong.
Republican voters are better at estimating the risk, but they still skew heavily towards overestimating the risk, although a noticeable portion of them are underestimating it.
There's been a massive campaign against "misinformation" throughout this entire pandemic, case numbers and death numbers are widely available, so why are Americans overwhelmingly flat out wrong on this statistic?
For example, recent data from the UK https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... shows [Table 2] that the probability of a case given {vaccinated, unvaccinated} is within a factor of 5 of each other (in fact, for some age groups, the probability of being a "case" is higher for the vaccinated). Also, the probability of being hospitalized is within a factor of 10 between the two groups for all ages [Table 3]. There is no way to get the three orders of magnitude difference that you quote given these figures.
> why are Americans overwhelmingly flat out wrong on this statistic?
Speaking for myself, if somebody called my phone out of the blue to ask me a stupid question (are you republican or democrat? what's the probability of hospitalization?) I would make up an answer just to troll them. I would probably mention Bill Gates' chips as well. What's my incentive to tell the truth, given that I believe that all polls and media are a bunch of liars?
They're right in the article, check the appendix.
These are...not the same thing. The hospitalization risk is the probability of someone being hospitalized in some specified tome window starting from today. The retrospective hospitalization rate is obviously one of the variables that would be used to estimate the risk, but it takes a particular non-obvious set of assumptions (or, more likely, just confusing the two things) to have the retrospective pandemic-to-date rate also be the current risk; or even to assume that this gets the relevant risk right for vaccinated to unvaccinated (vaccines haven't been available the whole pandemic and have been disproportionately, especially initially, received by higher risk groups, so there are all sorts of distortions of relative risk in the retrospective rates depending on the precise time window chosen
Equating these things is exactly assuming that past performance precisely predicts future outcomes even where the context which produced the past performance is rapidly changing.
And since the risk of covid is extremely age-stratified and depending on risk factors, the correct answer can vary up to five magnitudes depending on who you're asking, which this poll also doesn't address.
So even though the correct answer for the question in the poll is heavily skewed upwards by being the calculated mean, most Americans still overestimate the actual risk by up to two magnitudes.
For all the talk this year about political divides due to not sharing the same objective reality, that's an astounding amount of wrong from the side that claims to be on the same side as science.
The questions asked are right in the text of the article itself.