Are you not going to the hospital when you really need to because you’re scared of getting the coronavirus?

My physician colleagues have patients that were so terrified of getting the coronavirus that they did not go into the hospital with signs of a stroke or heart attack. They either died or were left with severe disabilities like paralysis. Hospitals around the nation are reporting a 40-50% reduction in admissions for heart attacks and strokes. Surely, there has not been a coincidental dramatic decrease in these conditions!

Before we engage in risk reduction behaviors, we need to be aware of the magnitude of the true risk to us, and not be led simply by our perception of it. There are people who get into a car everyday without a second thought but won’t get on a plane because they think their risk of dying in a plane is higher. This is a misperception of risk, because in reality, you’re more likely to die in your car. Even when we know the true risk, different people have different levels of tolerance for risk. Some are perfectly happy parachuting out of a plane, while others won’t even get on one.

We need to ask ourselves how far we are willing to go to reduce our personal risk from coronavirus – the answer will be different for each individual. The risk will never be zero.

I’ve seen social media memes about virus positive persons infecting every person that they come in contact with. There are also memes of infected people leaving a cloud of virus trailing behind them, as though this cloud is infecting every person that walks through it. These are misleading, because we have a fairly good idea that this is not what happens. On average, one infected person causes 2.5 secondary infections.

Just because a surface is contaminated with the virus, doesn’t mean that you will automatically get infected by touching it. Just because you passed by someone who had the virus, doesn’t mean you are going to get infected by them. You need to get enough of an infectious dose for that to happen. A larger dose means a greater chance of getting infected and likely more severe disease as well.

So while it is dangerous to minimize the risks of coronavirus by saying it’s no different from the flu, it is also dangerous to overstate the risks and get people paranoid about it. Please don’t ignore other risks in your zest to reduce your exposure to the coronavirus. For some of you, the risk of dying from those other conditions may actually be higher than that of dying from the “c”.