The Perfect Meme
Cognitive errors in understanding the 2019-2020 coronavirus crisis
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Wryc Gozo Guzzler
[email protected]
April 16th, 2020
”Three men make a tiger”
Chinese proverb
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Introduction
As of the beginning of April 2020 the following claim is prevalent and widely accepted as fact:
The new virus resulted in a very high mortality rate and caused the pandemic endangering global
population.
We examine a selection of cognitive errors and social phenomena that contribute to spreading
the above and related more specific claims. The article does not assume knowledge of epidemiology.
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Cognitive errors
2.1
Selection bias
Selection bias occurs when the selection of participants is not random or complete. The common
source of this error lies in taking a sample not from the general population, but from a subpopu-
lation that is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.
Specific claim
The mortality rate is very high. In Italy every 8th infected person dies. For example, as of April
15th, the number of confirmed infected cases is 165,000 and number of related deaths tested posi-
tively with coronavirus is 22,000. By dividing these numbers we get mortality rate greater than 13%
The main problem here is that the 165,000 positively tested cases were not taken from the gen-
eral population. Instead, only people with severe symptoms who have been admitted to hospitals
were taken into account. It means that we ignore infected people showing mild symptoms or no
symptoms at all. In order to realize how grave error it is, let’s imagine the following setup. We
take the sample of terminally ill patients from the intensive care unit. Before they die, we test
them against some trait.
∗ This
work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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