[gmarx]

This is well known in medicine except it often works in the opposite direction, i.e. it tricks people into way overestimating the chance that something rare will happen. So yes, across a population, some children will die of COVID, but your child isn't going to die of COVID.

OTOH it often works against you in the forward direction, e.g. tricking people into thinking we should screen everyone for everything all the time, because they don't appreciate how many incremental adverse events this will result in at scale (vs. the improvements in morbidity/mortality stats at scale)

[drewcoo]

Do you think it works that way in medicine or in public health?

Medicine is reactive. It is individually-focused. Something goes wrong, so we visit the doctor.

Public health is proactive but possibly based on bad predictions. It deals with populations instead of individuals. Concepts like "herd immunity" are from public health.

These approaches are oppositional and perhaps complementary.

https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(11)00514-9/ful...

[gmarx]

I don't understand? Which way? Making people overestimate or underestimate risk? I think it works both ways in medicine and public health. In public health (as evidenced by the pandemic) people are still vulnerable to acting on small absolute numbers because they don't see how they compare to the population. Likewise they might ignore a factor that seems like a low percentage thing because they don't get how this translates into real absolute numbers.