From Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s famous The Black Swan:
A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.
A notable inversion: medical screening, such as the whole body MRI hyped by Prenuvo (previously discussed here) and Ezra as well as the GRAIL cancer blood test.
The anecdotal lives saved are the salient stories (look, we found a renal cell carcinoma in Pete, we saved his life).
The harms–false positives, anxiety, wasteful and sometimes dangerous invasive testing and treatment, additional utilization of the overburdened health system, and extra costs of that healthcare distributed across the system–are mere statistics.