In the Fall of 2020, my colleague, Prof. Immaculata De Vivo of the Harvard School of Public Health, and I wrote an essay about the public perception of risk and uncertainty, especially with regard to COVID-19. In this post, we are gathering comments from students in the Spring 2021 edition of "GenEd 1112: The Past and Present of the Future," an undergraduate course I teach at Harvard. Students were asked to read the essay, and then comment here on which part(s) of the discussion they expect would be most illuminating for non-quantitatively-inclined readers --and/or to suggest another framing of the issues discussed that would be more effective.
I think that the three paragraphs starting with "Looking at current projections for March 1, 2021--likely just before widespread vaccine distribution--" and ending with "and people misunderstand uncertainty" are the most illuminating paragraphs for non-quantitatively inclined people. This passage breaks down raw pandemic data and contextualizes it using jargon-free language and historical examples that most lay readers could understand. One of the biggest sources of misleading information were sensational news articles that provided raw statistics and "what-if" scenarios without contextualizing the data in terms of certainty, historical examples, or warranted level of concern. This article demonstrates that one can explain risk and uncertainty to lay readers in a digestible format that fully acknowledges the danger of the pandemic without causing undue anxiety about possible but exceedingly unlikely scenarios.