Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

Key findings:

The public are misinformed about Covid-19

· People remain very nervous/fearful about the threat of Covid but there is good evidence to show that public understanding of Covid’s mortality rate is overblown, in some instances very substantially.

· People think the median age at which Covid victims have died is just 65 when the average is 82.4 years (older than average life expectancy generally of 81.16 years).

· Generally speaking, the younger the person, the more inaccurate their estimate of the age of Covid’s victims.

· The publicity given to ‘long Covid’ has served to heighten fears about it, with a small majority (52 per cent) who believe that it affects around 1 patient in 3, when most estimates suggest it affects around 1 in 20.

· Staggeringly, some 41 per cent wrongly think Covid has been the single biggest cause of UK deaths in 2020.*

· There is however extensive awareness that there are four times as many cancer deaths per year (52 per cent) and that suicide takes more lives among under-50s in a typical year (51 per cent).**