How dangerous do people think covid actually is??

This morning I found myself in a coffee shop.

Including myself, there were two middle-aged ladies behind the counter, a family two adults and a child in another corner, what can best be described as an ‘aul lad’ in the doorway, and three cyclists-mamils outside

We got talking, as you do, and covid came up, as it does. I asked all six adults ‘what do you think is the fatality rate from C19, in other words of every 1000 people who get it how many people do you think will die?’

The estimates got ranged from the very precise ‘275’, through ‘a few hundred’ to ‘god I dunno but most I’d say’
The perception amongst all of these reasonably randomly selected adults was that this was a incredibly deadly disease the catching of which was near death sentence
Except…it’s not.

UK evidence, and remember it’s the UK that we are supposed to be looking at with horror because there is a hurricane of cases overwhelming their health system and it’s going to come to us, suggests it’s 0.14%

So every 1000 cases even with deadly dangerous delta gives 1.4 deaths. Orders of magnitude less than the coffee House sample suggested

Now this is not scientific and should only be taken as an indication for six people at the side of a coffee house thought. I am not aware of published research on what Irish population perceptions of C19 mortality might actually be….but the concern which we should have is that if there is a perception of this as much more dangerous than it is then political pressure will inevitably move to assuage those fears even if they are not real.