Why we fear the wrong things
WHEN it comes to assessing, evaluating and responding to risks, we all would like to think that we always take a rational approach. Yet our brains are remarkably bad at doing it.
A good example of this was recently highlighted by the strategic communications company KEKST CNC. It’s poll of 1,000 people in the UK showed that the average person thinks the coronavirus death rate is 100 times worse than it is.
We tend to view novel or unusual things as being more dangerous than things we are used to. We feel something is riskier when a large number of people are affected at once, rather than small numbers over a long period of time.
If a child abduction story is in the news, for example, parents will suddenly be alarmed, even if the actual risk of child kidnapping hasn’t gone up.
There have been various predictions that, ultimately, the lockdown will result in more lives being lost through alcohol and substance misuse, delayed cancer diagnosis, limited access to medical care, domestic violence, suicide and so forth, than the virus itself.
Despite this, we are far more shocked and scared by stories of people dying of the virus (even as numbers continue to dwindle) than fatalities caused by the effects of lockdown.
WHAT does it mean to be human? Thanks to scientist and robotics expert Dr Peter Scott-Morgan, it’s fast becoming more than just a philosophical question. He is going to extreme lengths in an attempt to cheat death since being diagnosed with motor neurone disease (the same illness that killed Professor Stephen Hawking in 2018.) He’s almost fully paralysed, except for a few muscles in his neck, and has had his voice box removed in order to help him breathe. He even uses a cyborg system to communicate. Peter has already defied the odds and lived a year longer than doctors predicted. Even so, it’s impossible not to have immense sympathy for the tragic position he finds himself in. But thanks to his enduring tenacity and extraordinary spirit, he’s giving hope to thousands of people who find themselves in an otherwise hopeless situation.