Can we help people understand their personal likelihood of dying from COVID-9 if they catch it by putting it in the context of other risks?

This Problem is based on work published in: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201721

Numbers on their own do not convey a perception of quantity—they need to be given context, particularly when the numbers are small [1]. However, the choice of the context (such as comparators for the risk) can clearly influence the perception of a risk [2-5]. Choosing contextual information that is ‘informative’ without being ‘persuasive’ is hard, if not impossible. A risk is more than just a number, a likelihood, and attempting to present risks to compare with each other which, to the audience, represent very different concepts can be perceived as unhelpful at best—manipulative at worst [5].