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Notes -
This Rasmussen poll indicates that a big chunk of Americans overestimate the fatality rate:
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/covid_19/conservative_news_viewers_more_accurately_estimate_covid_19_death_risk
I do not particularly trust phone interview polling, but this is the best we’ve got.
Weird, although it seems like the bulk of the population is just wildly innumerate and/or uninformed, regardless of political leaning:
That's a substantial majority of even the right-wing listeners getting it wrong, and OAN is even worse than the leftist networks. Possibly the people I know I just aren't so innumerate, since none of them talk (or act) like they expect people to get COVID every 6 months or have a 20% chance of dying from it in the next 10 years.
I remember once reading a study that showed that Americans had no idea what portion of each major political party had certain "stereotypical" demographics (e.g. rich or Evangelical or Republicans, black or LGBT for Democrats). The outgroup estimate was worse, but even the ingroup estimates were just incredibly wrong.
I think I said something like this long ago, like summer of 2020, but I think a big chunk of the population just has no idea what numbers mean. 1/5th of the population is definitely not acting like COVID has a 10% fatality rate (either that or they're all basically suicidal). I don't know how else to interpret someone who says that, but also ever leaves their house.
That's a weird metric, though: "Got it wrong." What does that mean? Anyone who doesn't guess "Below 2%" (which is still wildly wrong where it matters).
If 75% of OANN viewers "get it wrong" by guessing 3-10%, that's still directionally far better than only half of CNN viewers thinking it's 50%.
Seems like a better metric would be an average of how wrong each cohort is.
2% isn't actually that wrong, since it's asking about case fatality rate rather than infection fatality rate, and the linked article gives this value as 1.6%.
That's what I would call "damning with faint praise." It's also not actually relevant to the exact claim above, which refers to the "median Democrat" (so it doesn't matter how wrong the tail respondents are). But it's more generally not relevant, because taking these numbers literally and doing math on them is meaningless.
I agree that a more precise breakdown would be helpful in general, but the article doesn't seem to provide that.
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https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
This is probably what you're thinking of. If not, it is at least conceptually related.
People are bad at estimating things, especially low incidence things. However, people also don't generally act as if the estimates they make are true.
That has different subgroups than the one I'm thinking of, but it seems to show similar results, although is not split out by the respondent's politics AFAICT.
Yes, but I also think this makes it very difficult for me to accept this claim from the earlier comment:
There might be a sense in which it is true that people would say this (I still think it's exaggerated though; every 6 months is a lot). But almost no one acts like they believe anything remotely like this. Like, you have conservatives saying COVID is basically the flu, but then saying its fatality rate is much higher than the flu's actual fatality rate, and if you asked them what the flu fatality rate is, they probably also be wildly wrong. What does all of this mean? I really don't think you can draw any conclusions beyond "people are ignorant and innumerate."
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