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As the partner of a critical care nurse during COVID-19, the perception gulf between "everyone" and "frontline medical workers" was mind-boggling vast. The for

by ethbr1 2y ago

As the partner of a critical care nurse during COVID-19, the perception gulf between "everyone" and "frontline medical workers" was mind-boggling vast. The former didn't see people on ventilators and dying, but yet still had strong opinions about how serious it was or wasn't. The latter went into work every day and saw the flood of critical patients, then finally went out after lockdown and heard about how it was an imaginary pandemic. ... I wonder why we had so many nurses leave the profession?

nostromo 2y ago
Your partner is the one with the biased view, not the general public. Only sick people go to urgent care, so your partner saw a very biased sample. The rest of us saw something much closer to reality.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  But "sufficiently-sick people go to the hospital" is always true, surely? You don't get loads more people in hospital unless loads more people are getting sick. A biased sample's informative if you know exactly how it's biased – in fact, it can be more informative. (If you want to study popular music, you look at the charts, not a random sample of tracks uploaded to SoundCloud.)
- rscho 2y ago
  How is your view closer to reality?! We saw fucking legions of people flood our ICUs overnight, and those were not all people that 'would have died anyway', far from it. How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality?
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    >How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality? Deaths of Immediate family or a few close friends. Most people didn't think they would die and the overwhelming majority didn't. For a lot of people, I think their intuitive reaction works out pretty close to chance of death vs years lost due to quarantine.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      For an objective/scientific reasoning behind this, I once read somewhere (no citations handy, sorry) that humans can't really "associate" at a personal level with more than a few hundred people or so at once. This means that beyond the family, friends, co-workers and other professional relations, and "the village/church" so to speak it actually doesn't matter at the individual level what happens to those outside of that circle.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        Dunbar's number = max ~150 stable simultaneous relationships https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number Which honestly probably plays into the perception a lot, as anything with lower mortality becomes probability rather than self experience. And if there's one thing that the lottery has taught us -- most people are terrible at intuiting correctly about probability. It could be 1:1,000 or 1:10,000 or 1:1,000,000, and it'd essentially be the same to someone who relies on their gut perception.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        People are bad at probability, but I think that cuts both ways on the covid issue. You have healthy 20 year olds who still wont leave their house and living depressed lonely lives because of that 1:1,000,000 chance. My elderly parents wanted to keep seeing people, even if they were exposed. They said their remaining life expectancy was probably 10 years. They weren't going sacrifice a few of those precious years for even a 5% mortality rate.
maskzoff 2y ago
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by ethbr1 2y ago

nostromo 2y ago

Your partner is the one with the biased view, not the general public. Only sick people go to urgent care, so your partner saw a very biased sample. The rest of us saw something much closer to reality.

wizzwizz4 2y ago
But "sufficiently-sick people go to the hospital" is always true, surely? You don't get loads more people in hospital unless loads more people are getting sick. A biased sample's informative if you know exactly how it's biased – in fact, it can be more informative. (If you want to study popular music, you look at the charts, not a random sample of tracks uploaded to SoundCloud.)
rscho 2y ago
How is your view closer to reality?! We saw fucking legions of people flood our ICUs overnight, and those were not all people that 'would have died anyway', far from it. How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality?
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  >How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality? Deaths of Immediate family or a few close friends. Most people didn't think they would die and the overwhelming majority didn't. For a lot of people, I think their intuitive reaction works out pretty close to chance of death vs years lost due to quarantine.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    For an objective/scientific reasoning behind this, I once read somewhere (no citations handy, sorry) that humans can't really "associate" at a personal level with more than a few hundred people or so at once. This means that beyond the family, friends, co-workers and other professional relations, and "the village/church" so to speak it actually doesn't matter at the individual level what happens to those outside of that circle.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Dunbar's number = max ~150 stable simultaneous relationships https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number Which honestly probably plays into the perception a lot, as anything with lower mortality becomes probability rather than self experience. And if there's one thing that the lottery has taught us -- most people are terrible at intuiting correctly about probability. It could be 1:1,000 or 1:10,000 or 1:1,000,000, and it'd essentially be the same to someone who relies on their gut perception.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        People are bad at probability, but I think that cuts both ways on the covid issue. You have healthy 20 year olds who still wont leave their house and living depressed lonely lives because of that 1:1,000,000 chance. My elderly parents wanted to keep seeing people, even if they were exposed. They said their remaining life expectancy was probably 10 years. They weren't going sacrifice a few of those precious years for even a 5% mortality rate.

maskzoff 2y ago

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