Hysterias are only possible because people fail to reason about the rumors they receive. They accept and act on information without verifying that information or using common sense to analyze it. I remember once my boss at work (Wes Wilkey at Clinical Networx) forwarded an email to every employee in the company and this email contained a "news story" claiming that someone had been putting AIDS-tainted needles in the change return of public pay phones. The text had no place or time given. No names were provided. There was no way to verify what the email claimed. Nevertheless, my boss accepted this email at face value and considered it to be such important information that it needed to sent to every employee in his company. Many of the news stories fueling the current pandemic hysteria are of this nature: unverifiable claims that do not stand up to rational analysis. Below are some of these claims followed by the questions a reasonable person should be asking about them.
COVID-19 is spreading all over the world.
Cold viruses normally spread only in limited areas (they are "seasonally endemic"). What is special about this virus that it can apparently spread over the entire world--something no other cold virus is known to do?
COVID-19 is spread silently by asymptomatic carriers. It is transferred by people coughing respiratory droplets.
These two statements frequently found in the media are contradictory.
Most infected people show no symptoms.
Normally, cold infections cause symptoms. Why is this virus an exception?
COVID-19 is deadly, but only to old, sick people.
If this virus is so deadly, why does it have such a mild effect on most people?
Italy is hard hit by the virus because there are a lot of old people in Italy
Why are countries with similar demographics, like Spain and Greece, not similarly affected?
A nursing home in Washington state had a lot of deaths caused by COVID-19.
How do we know the deaths were caused by COVID-19, not pneumonia?
There are thousands of other similar nursing homes in the United States. Why are they not affected the same way?
Over a thousand people have died of COVID-19 in Iran.
Considering that there are very few labs in Iran capable of doing COVID-19 genomic testing, how do the Iranians know these people even had COVID-19, much less died of it?
COVID-19 can be detected by a genomic test.
What is the false positive rate for the test?
What is the percentage of tested individuals who had a positive result?
There are infected people in every state.
Why is the disease appearing in remote, interior states like Wyoming simultaneously with cosmopolitan states like California?