The Downside of Making People Worry about Covid

The study comes to us from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital, or 'The Neuro.'  We should make very clear what it is and what it is not.

It does not measure the psychological or neurological impact of having Covid-19. It only measures the psychological impact of worrying about Covid-19.

Whatever the virus does, whatever effects it has on brain functioning, these are not part of the study. The researchers wanted to see what happened to people who showed more or less anxiety about the virus. And it discovered that more worrying meant impaired cognitive functioning. Anxiety about the pandemic made it more difficult to perform cognitive tasks.

Worried folk are worse at processing information about retaining information and are more likely to obsess about catastrophic outcomes. The latter involves risk assessment, meaning that people who are worried about the virus are more likely to be more sensitive to risk. Which makes sense.

Dare we mention, that, for all we know, the people who are most worried about Covid-19 are more likely to be more anxious in general. Thus, one needs to modify one’s excitement about the results. 

At the very least, worrying in general, which the psycho world calls excessive anxiety, apparently impairs cognitive functioning. At the very least, this suggests that government officials who are trying to make people panic about the pandemic are disserving the public.

The story comes from The Daily Mail:

A new study has found that those who are worried about the COVID-19 pandemic are slower at processing information, worse at retaining information and more likely to overestimate negative odds than their less anxious counterparts.

The authors concluded that people more worried about coronavirus and its effects performed worse at information processing tests and had a distorted view of risk levels.

The study also points out an interesting fact. Once the government, here the Canadian government, decided to mass produce general panic about the virus, the cognitive abilities of the general populace declined. In short, producing generalized worry makes people more dysfunctional. One can ask whether this applies to children, especially to children who are being kept out of school. 

One understands, because it has now been widely reported, that shutting down schools was one of the worst policies for dealing with the pandemic. This is so because it damaged children’s ability to learn. In truth, the policy was so bad that the usual band of leftist twits has been running around defending the teachers’ unions, that is, the people who militated for school closings.

Regardless of worry, researchers found that people surveyed in June 2020 - by the time governments had taken strict lockdown measures and news coverage of the pandemic was constant - performed worse than pre-pandemic groups and exhibited 'slower processing speed, lower task-switching accuracy, and were more sensitive to risk.'

So, causing the general public to panic damages cognitive functioning:

'The basic cognitive abilities measured here are crucial for healthy daily living and decision-making,' said study author and McGill graduate student Kevin da Silva Castanheira in a statement released by the Canadian university.

'The impairments associated with worry observed here suggest that under periods of high stress, like a global pandemic, our ability to think, plan, an evaluate risks is altered. Understanding these changes are critical as managing stressful situations often relies on these abilities.'

The study was published in the open access journal PLOS ONE on November 18.

One concludes that the public policy solution of producing generalized panic, anxiety and worry was counterproductive-- because it impaired cognitive functioning and thus the ability to conduct everyday life and even to do one’s job.