Cause I just had the occasion to remember it, I'd like to bring this survey back to people's attention.
Among other things, it showed that even back in August, a far higher percentage of Americans reported wearing masks than many countries in Europe... But also, and what grabbed the most attention, that Americans believed 225x more people have died of covid in the US than reality.
Innumeracy and not having a concept of percentages can explain some of this, but the bigger issue has always been the media hysteria machine.
I have little reason to believe that just like how the IFR is vastly lower than people assumed, and the overwhelming majority of cases are much milder than expected, and the lockdown strategy failed miserably, and how we're now starting to grok that the virus was here much earlier and is much more widespread (something that people like John Ioannides suggested months ago and was ripped to shreds for suggesting)... We will continue to find evidence that the hysteria was both counterproductive and largely built on false assumptions.
Hell, it may not have even originated in China, which will be the feather in the cap of all the things that people have gotten massively wrong.
Part of my point with this is simply that perhaps the dumbest thing everyone has done this whole time is turn shaming dissenting opinions and discussions of facts that don't fit the prevailing narrative into a self righteous moral crusade. Out social media networks also bear a ton of responsibility for this, as they have continually squashed tons of commentary and data in the name of eliminating false information... But especially in a highly fluid, complex, unique situation like this, NO ONE knows what is or is not true. We need to debate and hash it out openly.
And we needed to avoid making it a moral or political crusade precisely because such things inevitably push people to treat alternative viewpoints as hostile or even evil, instead of accepting the possibility that they might be true.
Even after we've seen example after example of widely believed stuff that turned out to be false, even though it was supported by government officials and broadcast across our major media and social media networks, I still see this sense of hostility all over the place.