The year in Covid ‘Messaging’

Of course, this is gibberish: 40% of Covid cases are asymptomatic; 80% of symptomatic cases are mild and indistinguishable from the common cold or the flu, so the victim has little reason to get tested. Our borders are porous. So far we have only tested about 80% of Americans even once. We should test 330 million every few days to catch a useful percentage of Covid cases while they are still infectious. Add contact tracing and numbers are clearly impossible. But because the strategy has been useful in a South Korean context, our politicians are going through the motions here.

Another messaging snafu passed last summer. Robert Redfield of the CDC admitted that our tests could catch only 10% of cases, that is, the circus that fills hours of airtime in the media is doing nothing to control the outbreak or even the measure.

Official lies about things big and small have been a staple of Covid policy: letters to students threatening them with arrest if they are not quarantined, “bans” on travel between states that were never enforced, deaths count that swept away anyone who died of any cause while infected with Covid.

You could say it started on day one. I don’t go to the doctor for a cold or the flu, neither do 80-95% of you. This has implications: Once hospitals in Wuhan were besieged with severe cases, it was a waste of time to wonder if the virus was there. It was here. The stranded flights, the recent arrivals testing was so hectic that our government could be seen doing something.

The mummery served to smother and dilute a message politicians weren’t happy to deliver: it would be up to us, the citizens, to control Covid as best we can.

Lockdowns are imagined as a kind of forced social distancing. They are not. Mandatory business closures do not stop people from spreading the disease. Letting businesses stay open doesn’t force them to spread disease.

People spread the disease by their own decisions, every moment, about when, where and how to put themselves at risk.

It is only recently that this reality has crept into public rhetoric as leaders in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere have begun to admit that their actions are more about “signaling” than anything. what a practical effect.

No messaging strategy has been judged more poorly than the one our politicians chose for a vaccine, deciding that nothing was more important than signaling that no corner was cut.

I didn’t make a fuss at the time because I assumed any vaccine would come only after the initial epidemic ravaged society and wore itself out. In fact, we had some very promising candidates a few days after the virus streak last January. Operation Warp Speed ​​triumphed by compressing the normal development process in a way that would make no sense with shareholder money. It is now indisputable that we should have ditched the normal process and accepted more vaccine risk in exchange for the potential payoff of saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in lost wages in 2020.

At the end of the year, experts from around the world lectured about the lessons of the pandemic: the need to change our relationship with nature, the need for increased disease surveillance, etc.

Most of them won’t matter when natural selection causes another disease with the properties of Covid-19. The virus did not just spread easily; above all, its effects were mild enough that for billions of humans, the cost of canceling it outweighed the personal benefits.

This basic truth that our lackluster media spent much of 2020 trying not to understand. Worse yet, he tried to do away with this truth by frightening or morally intimidating people into engaging in behaviors that conflicted with perceived self-interest.

This turned out to be the dead end he usually does. We need to improve. Limited social distancing to protect the most vulnerable is the only type that is likely to be sustainable over time. More importantly, next time around, let’s be prepared to accept a level of risk in vaccine development commensurate with the potential benefit of stopping such a costly epidemic as soon as possible.