The year in Covid ‘Messaging’

It’s gibberish, of course: 40% of Covid cases are asymptomatic; 80% of symptomatic cases are mild and indistinguishable from a cold or flu, leaving the patient with little reason to get tested. Our borders are porous. So far we’ve only tested about 80% of Americans even agree. We would have to test 330 million every few days to catch a useful percentage of Covid cases while they are still contagious. Add contact tracking and the numbers are clearly impossible. But because the strategy was useful in a South Korean context, our politicians are going through the motions here.

Another messaging snafu came through last summer. The CDC’s Robert Redfield admitted that our tests may catch only 10% of cases – that is, the circus filling hours of media airtime is doing nothing to control or even measure the epidemic.

Officially lying about things big and small is a staple of Covid politics: the letters to students threatening them with arrest if they don’t go to quarantine, the ‘interstate travel bans’ that were never enforced, the number of deaths that engulfed everyone who died from any cause while infected with Covid.

No doubt it started on the first day. I don’t go to the doctor for a cold or flu, and neither do 80% to 95% of you. This has implications: Once Wuhan hospitals were besieged with severe cases, it was a waste of time wondering if the virus was here. It was here. The blocked flights, testing recent arrivals were so much hand-waving that our government did something.

The mummy served to capture and dilute a message that politicians were reluctant to convey: it would be up to us citizens to control Covid as best we can.

Lockdowns are supposed to be a kind of enforced social distance. They are not. Mandatory plant closures do not prevent people from spreading the disease. Keeping businesses open doesn’t force them to spread the disease.

People spread the disease through their own decisions, moment to moment, about when, where and how to expose themselves to risk.

Only recently has this reality entered public rhetoric when leaders in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere began to admit that their steps have more to do with “ signaling ” than any practical effect.

No messaging strategy had been rated as badly as the one our politicians chose for a vaccine, deciding that nothing was more important than signaling that no turns were being taken.

I didn’t make a fuss at the time because I assumed a vaccine wouldn’t come until after the initial epidemic ravaged society and burned itself up. In fact, we had promising candidates days after the virus was sequenced last January. Operation Warp Speed ​​was triumphant in compressing the normal development process in ways that wouldn’t make sense with shareholder money. It is now indisputable that we should have skipped the normal process and accepted more vaccination risk in exchange for the future benefit of saving thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in lost wages by 2020.

At the end of the year, experts everywhere preached the lessons of the pandemic: the need to change our relationship with nature, the need for increased disease surveillance, etc.

Most of it doesn’t matter at all when natural selection evokes another disease with the properties of Covid-19. Not only was the virus easily transmitted; Crucially, its effects were mild enough that for billions of people, the cost of destruction outweighed the personal benefit.

This rock solid truth that our non-insightful media has spent much of 2020 trying not to understand. Worse still, it tried to make this truth go away by scaring or morally bullying people into conduct that conflicts with alleged self-interest.

This turned out to be the dead end it usually does. We need to freshen up. Limited social distance to protect the most vulnerable is the only species likely to prove sustainable over time. Most importantly, next time let’s be ready to accept a level of risk in vaccine development commensurate with the potential benefit of stopping such a costly epidemic sooner or later.