BackMedia should be careful about how it reports cases of Omicron
Vaccine hesitancy could rise if an ‘availability bias’ leads people to draw faulty conclusions on risk
PremiumCases of covid linked to the newly discovered Omicron variant of the virus have started to be reported in India and other parts of the world. Time will tell how transmissible, immune-system evasive and vaccine resistant this strain is. Nonetheless, at some point, as was the case with earlier waves and variants, news reports of those who were fully vaccinated and yet got infected by Omicron will start to appear. It is very important that the media reports such cases carefully, simply because such reports shouldn’t end up promoting vaccine hesitancy in any way, as they have in the past.
Steven Pinker makes this point in Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters: “During the rollout of Covid vaccines known to have a 95 percent efficacy rate, [journalists] wrote stories on the vaccinated people who came down with the disease… to scare thousands from this lifesaving treatment." The question is whether the media should have reported vaccinated people getting covid? Yes, it should have. Nonetheless, at the same time, stories about scores of vaccinated people who got covid and recovered should also have been reported with the same zeal. And that was perhaps missing.
This is very similar to how reporting on aircraft crashes happens. Every aircraft crash anywhere in the world gets reported, but none of the many more safe landings that happen during the course of any year get written about, simply because an aircraft crashing is news while a safe landing isn’t.
This leads to the rise of the ‘availability bias’ when people try to figure out the riskiness of anything. They tend to recall examples that come to mind easily and immediately, and overestimate the risk of those things happening. Take the case of car crashes, which happen far more often than aeroplane crashes but almost never make notable news. As Pinker writes: “Plane crashes… get lavish coverage, but they kill only about 250 people a year worldwide, making planes about a thousand times safer per passenger mile than cars."
This has real world repercussions. In the aftermath of 9/11, many more people in the US took to driving because they were afraid of flying. Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hograth and Anil Gaba write in Dance with Chance: “It has been estimated that—in the year following 9/11—some 1,600 deaths could have been avoided if people had not driven but instead carried on taking the plane as usual." The availability bias essentially led people to overestimate the risk of flying and underestimate that of driving. There are more examples of the same.
In April 2016, The Atlantic wrote about the then US president Barack Obama frequently reminding “his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than… car accidents… and falls in bathtubs do." While it was insensitive of Obama to say what he did, the data backed him up.
As Hector Macdonald writes in Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality: “According to the National Safety Council, 464 people drowned in American baths in 2013; 1,810 drowned in natural water, 903 were accidentally suffocated or strangled in bed, and more than 30,000 died by falling." In that year, only three people in the US were killed by terrorists.
Of course, as is the case with airline crashes, every terrorist attack gets reported on top of the news, whereas deaths due to drowning and falling don’t find any mention simply because there are way too many of them happening in comparison with terror attacks. This leads to an overestimation of one’s risk of dying in an attack by terrorists and far less attention paid to the risk of losing one’s life in a freak accident.
So how does all this matter in the current covid scheme of things? If the Omicron variant spreads and people who have taken the vaccine also get covid, it is important for the media to cover such stories completely, not just report breakthrough cases and then forget about it. If the person recovers, that needs to be reported as well. This will ensure that vaccine hesitancy doesn’t keep getting propagated.
Also important is proper maintenance and reporting of data at an aggregate level. There needs to be a proper breakdown available of how many vaccinated people got covid due to the new variant and what proportion recovered. This data needs to be available at district, state and national levels. It needs to be widely reported, so that the larger picture is clear. If current vaccines aren’t very effective against the new variant, then people will have to be extra cautious. Every effort needs to be made to avoid feeding the availability bias.
To conclude, there is an inherent bias built into the way news is reported. Only what is newsy enough gets reported and consumers of news should keep this in mind while trying to understand reality as it exists.
The media needs to do its bit as well. As Pinker argues: “A… plane crash should be accompanied by the annual rate, which takes into account the denominator of the probability, not just the numerator."
Similarly, while reporting on the spread of covid caused by the Omicron variant, it is important to report the recovery rate among the vaccinated who get the disease. That would be the right way to put its risk in perspective.
Vivek Kaul is the author of ‘Bad Money’.
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