Arizonans Have Not Perceived Much Pressure For or Against Pandemic Protocols

 

News reports and breathless opinion pieces on both the right and left have painted a pretty bleak picture of social conflict during the pandemic. This seems to have subsided by now, but man, in 2020 and 2021 things were hot.

We heard about people being attacked with hammers for wearing masks and others being confronted while shopping for not wearing masks. Workers at vaccine clinics have been attacked and called murderers. Workers asking for proof of vaccination have been attacked too.

With all of this attacking going on, you'd be forgiven for thinking there is nowhere to hide from pressure to follow—or not follow—pandemic mitigation protocols. But there is new data suggesting that this impression is not a true picture of how things are, in Arizona anyway.

CoVHORT is a research project on COVID-19 being conducted by the University of Arizona. It is longitudinal, meaning it collects data at multiple points over a long period, using the same participants. CoVHORT has just over 8000 Arizonans enrolled, including me (if you'd like to participate click here).

They occasionally release infographics sharing their results. The other day they sent an email sharing results about perceived severity of the disease in those infected, and the amount of pressure people felt to conform or not conform with mitigation measures.

This is their graphic on perceived severity:


I would by default expect this to be "normally distributed," i.e. fitting under a bell-shaped curve. I was surprised to see the low percentages in the high severity levels. The distribution is also bi-modal, meaning it has two high-points, and it has an average below the middle. For most Arizonans who were infected, COVID-19 apparently wasn't all that bad. 

The email also contained results about the pressure Arizonans reported feeling in favor of and against adhering to COVID protocols at work and in personal/social interaction. They presented this data using pie charts, in my opinion not the best choice for making comparisons. So I reworked their results like so:


Given all the news accounts I've seen like those reported above I was surprised to see so little evidence of perceived pressure. Except for pro-protocol pressure in personal/social life, large majorities perceived no pressure at all. 

Both for and against skewed higher in personal/social life than at work, maybe because so many people have been working remotely. The most pressure appears to be for protocols in personal/social life. There was more pressure for pandemic protocols than against, again something I did not expect given what I've seen in the news.

This makes me realize I may be a victim of availability bias, in which people form impressions based on evidence that comes most easily to mind. Maybe I've been consuming too many aggressive COVIDiot stories. Thanks, science!







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