Thread by @swillsm

A 🧵on #COVID19 Survivorship Bias
on #SocialMedia

Working as a counsellor and drawing on personal experience as someone who’s immunocompromised, I’m ever conscious of the growing gulf between private and public experiences in this pandemic.

Survivorship Bias refers our mental short cut that focuses us on stories of success, not failure. This distorts our world view and also impacts our capacity to assess risk in a pandemic where public health has been dumped in favour of ‘personal responsibility’. #COVID19

It comes from a famous example from World War Two when the military tried to assess the damage on returning planes in order to protect future ones and initially decided the planes’ extremities like wings etc were most vulnerable. #CovidIsntOver

They failed to consider their survivorship bias until Mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out that returning planes had survived gunfire and it was the ones that did not return eg those that were hit in the body and therefore this area that needed reinforcement. #CovidIsNotOver

Everyday in my counselling work, I hear multiple Australian stories of illness, disability, trauma, grief and loss both directly caused by and compounded by the #COVID19 pandemic. I also hear these stories increasingly from family and friends. I am aware these stories impact me.

Like millions of us, I also increasingly navigate the world
via social media. #CovidIsNotOver

I’m increasingly aware of the ever growing disconnect between real life and the superficially edited and manicured version of life on social media. #CovidIsNotOver

Many of us therefore withdraw from these spaces or learn not to share much of our lives. We thankfully also find and retreat to safe spaces which but this means the chasm widens. #CovidIsNotOver

Our political leaders and media reinforce and mirror these distortions and the delusion that #COVID19 is over and thus the survivorship bias snowballs.

This our growing awareness of this survivorship bias challenges us all to push back against othering and exclusion, to take risks in being the ones to educate, inform, include and share our warts and all experiences of our lives during the #COVID19 pandemic. #CovidIsNotOver

@threadreaderapp please unroll