It reminds me of something I read here the other week, one third of Americans know someone who died of coronavirus. So telling stories about what happened to a

It reminds me of something I read here the other week, one third of Americans know someone who died of coronavirus. So telling stories about what happened to a friend works as a sort of "probability amplifier": it only takes one event for a lot of people to have a happened-to-a-friend story. And that's before we even take into account the risk of mistelling that increases with second-hand information.