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New research from the UC Davis finds people are becoming desensitized to the COVID 19 pandemic.
The UC DAVIS Researchers find that despite the rising death toll, people are showing less concern about COVID-related news and instead are shifting back to risky social behavior and are less fearful. The paper, “Desensitization to Fear-Inducting COVID-19 Health News on Twitter: Observational Study,” was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Infodemiology on July 16. The researchers examined how COVID-19 news articles shared to Twitter were first met with anxiety-ridden tweets early in the pandemic, during a coinciding spike in instances of panic-buying, extreme social distancing and quarantine measures.
Despite the increased death toll, those behaviors then gave way over time to less concerned responses to COVID-19 news, along with increases in societal risk-taking during that time period.