I’ve said elsewhere that my hypothesis for this discrepancy is that people think of “had COVID” in terms of a set of experiences, not in terms of viruses/antibodies inside them. If I had a completely asymptomatic COVID infection, did I “have COVID”? I’d probably say yes, but I think it’s very reasonable to say no. The people who had a negative test and said that they did have COVID are slightly more surprising, but perhaps they contracted some other disease and mistakenly attributed all symptoms to COVID.
I agree with the broader point that people give weird answers to survey questions, and seemingly immaterial differences to the survey methodology can yield wildly different answers. I once streamlined a survey by removing 1 click per question and respondents answered 3 times as many questions on average.
I’ve said elsewhere that my hypothesis for this discrepancy is that people think of “had COVID” in terms of a set of experiences, not in terms of viruses/antibodies inside them. If I had a completely asymptomatic COVID infection, did I “have COVID”? I’d probably say yes, but I think it’s very reasonable to say no. The people who had a negative test and said that they did have COVID are slightly more surprising, but perhaps they contracted some other disease and mistakenly attributed all symptoms to COVID.
I agree with the broader point that people give weird answers to survey questions, and seemingly immaterial differences to the survey methodology can yield wildly different answers. I once streamlined a survey by removing 1 click per question and respondents answered 3 times as many questions on average.