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Opinion: Stop Worrying About Extremely Unlikely Covid Risks
Posted
February 25, 2021
Views
518
Likes
30
Comments
3
Engagement
6.37%
February 25, 2021
518
30
3
6.37%
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3:40Now PlayingThe USDA has now announced that there’s “no credible evidence” that people can get Covid-19 from touching packages in the grocery store. At first blush, this sounds like a breakthrough — but there was no evidence of this in the spring of 2020 either.
Throughout the pandemic , there’s been a tendency to play up unlikely risks, and not to talk enough about uncertainty and probabilities.
The risk of getting Covid-19 from groceries or mail or monkey bars was always a guess. Yes, there was an eye-popping lab experiment last spring that showed that parts of viral RNA — but not necessarily live virus — could persist for a few days on some surfaces. Yet the public was advised to scrub and sterilize everything, even though there was never evidence that groceries posed more than a tiny risk compared to crowded living or working conditions.
Science and science communication are both fraught with the potential for error — what makes them work is honesty and transparency. It’s not that hard to explain the difference between a potential danger that hasn’t been tested and something where there’s evidence piling up that the danger is minuscule. People can grasp that. It’s not rocket science.
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