I’ve been citing Turkish-via-UNC/Chapel Hill sociologist Zeynep Tufekci’s work on bringing actual scientific thought to the response to Covid almost as long as there’s been a pandemic.
There is literally zero evidence that Tufekci’s latest article in the Atlantic, 5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating, is aimed at the Walz administration and the MDH. But as Texas re-opens, Florida’s approach is largely vindicated, the wheels come off the California and New York approaches, and vaccines start to dribble out to the population, the thought of copying a link to the piece to the Governor is tempting.
As Walz (and his apparent public health mentor, Fauci) keep warning of more and more armageddons two weeks away, Tufekci takes us back to another pandemic, and its denouement
When the polio vaccine was declared safe and effective, the news was met with jubilant celebration. Church bells rang across the nation, and factories blew their whistles. “Polio routed!” newspaper headlines exclaimed. “An historic victory,” “monumental,” “sensational,” newscasters declared. People erupted with joy across the United States. Some danced in the streets; others wept. Kids were sent home from school to celebrate.
One might have expected the initial approval of the coronavirus vaccines to spark similar jubilation—especially after a brutal pandemic year. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the steady drumbeat of good news about the vaccines has been met with a chorus of relentless pessimism.
The problem is not that the good news isn’t being reported, or that we should throw caution to the wind just yet. It’s that neither the reporting nor the public-health messaging has reflected the truly amazing reality of these vaccines. There is nothing wrong with realism and caution, but effective communication requires a sense of proportion—distinguishing between due alarm and alarmism; warranted, measured caution and doombait; worst-case scenarios and claims of impending catastrophe. We need to be able to celebrate profoundly positive news while noting the work that still lies ahead. However, instead of balanced optimism since the launch of the vaccines, the public has been offered a lot of misguided fretting over new virus variants, subjected to misleading debates about the inferiority of certain vaccines, and presented with long lists of things vaccinated people still cannot do, while media outlets wonder whether the pandemic will ever end.
Remember last year? When some public health authorities were treating Covid like World War 2, with massive sacrifices, a potential (and, a year later, realized) horrific cost, and a goal for us all to pull toward – victory?
That went by the boards. Pushing to get back to normal – a “normal” that for the vast majority of Americans was as good as it’d been in a loooong time, last February – got replaced by telling people to hunker down for, well, the War on Terror. An endless, endemic, dreary plod.
Which has had terrible effects – skyrocketing addiction and suicide, rampant crime, and crushing depression among school-age kids and adults. The pandemic has brought out the best in some Americans – and forced the rest into the most dehumanizing humdrum imaginable to a First Worlder.
So it’s worth looking at the five mistakes Tufekci notes that we just keep failing, and perhaps stop doing them.
They are:
Risk Compensation – the notion that if you make people safer, they’ll just abuse that safety. The theory that if you put a seatbelt in a car, people will take that additional margin of safety and use it to drive faster and more recklessly.
It appeals to the “expert class”‘s paternalism – why become an expert if you can’t warn people “you’ll shoot your eye out with that thing”? As Tufekci puts it:
[Risk Compensation is] contrarian and clever, and fits the “here’s something surprising we smart folks thought about” mold that appeals to, well, people who think of themselves as smart. Unsurprisingly, such fears have greeted efforts to persuade the public to adopt almost every advance in safety, including seat belts, helmets, and condoms.
But time and again, the numbers tell a different story: Even if safety improvements cause a few people to behave recklessly, the benefits overwhelm the ill effects. In any case, most people are already interested in staying safe from a dangerous pathogen. Further, even at the beginning of the pandemic, sociological theory predicted that wearing masks would be associated with increased adherence to other precautionary measures—people interested in staying safe are interested in staying safe—and empirical research quickly confirmed exactly that. Unfortunately, though, the theory of risk compensation—and its implicit assumptions—continue to haunt our approach, in part because there hasn’t been a reckoning with the initial missteps.
Minnesota government’s paternalistic streak is gonna be a hard thing to overcome on this front.
Rules Over Mechanisms – This one is squarely on Walz and his regime. His focus on all the things we need to do to move his array of knobs and levers, like a Skinnerian behavioral experiment, tying actions to rewards – economic and personal freedom – was classic Minnesota passive-aggression. Even moreso, the state’s refusal to share the code for the model that predicted 20,000 dead at best, and a better figure of 70,000 fatalities by July, on the grounds that people might just find different results – which was the moment this state’s effort lost all pretense of scientific legitimacy.
I said, early on – why not give people and businesses good information, and let them do what needed to be done, with just the minimal enforcement for flagrant-to-depraved behavior? It is, after all, what they did in states that battled the pandemic successfully – Florida, Texas, and the Dakotas (who, notwithstanding a surge of cases and fatalities in the fall, are in much better economic shape than Minnesota.
Even Wisconsin – where the governor’s emergency powers were tossed out by courts in short order, and which had to rely on people knowing how to protect themselves, and so told them how to do just that – is doing better by every measure that wasn’t worse before the pandemic.
Scolding and Shaming – What goverment’s approach has lacked in scientific rigor, it’s made up for in empowering the simultaneously least stable and most petty-authoritarian among us to find their inner Dwight Schrute. Tufekci:
How dare you go to the beach? newspapers have scolded us for months, despite lacking evidence that this posed any significant threat to public health. It wasn’t just talk: Many cities closed parks and outdoor recreational spaces, even as they kept open indoor dining and gyms. Just this month, UC Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst both banned students from taking even solitary walks outdoors.
The first time I had some plush-bottom Karen scold me about putting my bag on the conveyor at the checkout at Target in Shoreview “before the cashier sanitized it” (after she’d spent five minutes arguing over a coupon), I realized there might be a scientific basis for this. Humans are adapted to be on the lookout for crises – the saber tooth tiger is still just outside the campfire’s light, and that neighboring tribe is eyeing all those berries that are starting to come in, in all of our inner psyches. And it’s been so long since we’ve had a genuine existential crisis – World War 2, the Depression – that all that evolutionary energy’s gotta go somewhere.
Combined with the other four things we’ve gotten wrong, it’s probably understandable that “Big Karen’s” energy is so misplaced.
I said “understandable”. Not OK.
Ignoring Collateral Harm – It’s been plain from the beginning – the people urging us to lock down hard and stay locked down to “eliminate the virus” are the ones with academic/public sector/large-corporate jobs that let ’em work from home indefinitely (well, so far).
We’ve been talking about many of the collateral harms – endemic depression, skyrocketing suicide, a generation of kids who are floundering emotionally and parents who are completely adrift trying to figure out what to do about it, suicide, stress and its many ailments, and skyrocketing crime, especially among bored and aimless youth on whom the suspension of most of regular life falls the hardest.
We’ve been talking about many of the collateral harms – endemic depression, skyrocketing suicide, a generation of kids who are floundering emotionally and parents who are completely adrift trying to figure out what to do about it, suicide, stress and its many ailments, and skyrocketing crime, especially among bored and aimless youth on whom the suspension of most of regular life falls the hardest.
But wait, we’re not done yet:
When we set perfection as the only option, it can cause people who fall short of that standard in one small, particular way to decide that they’ve already failed, and might as well give up entirely. Most people who have attempted a diet or a new exercise regimen are familiar with this psychological state. The better approach is encouraging risk reduction and layered mitigation—emphasizing that every little bit helps—while also recognizing that a risk-free life is neither possible nor desirable.
Socializing is not a luxury—kids need to play with one another, and adults need to interact. Your kids can play together outdoors, and outdoor time is the best chance to catch up with your neighbors is not just a sensible message; it’s a way to decrease transmission risks.
You’d never know this listening to NPR, to say nothing of “Karen”.
Misplaced Balance Between Knowledge And Action – Or “perfect is the enemy of good enough”.
In this case, “perfection” – knowledge – was hampered not merely by the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know (and, last January, weren’t allowed to find out behind China’s bamboo curtain), but that the academic, journalistic, and real worlds have such very different, often mutuall unintelligible means of communicating:
…sometimes, the way that academics communicate clashed with how the public constructs knowledge. In academia, publishing is the coin of the realm, and it is often done through rejecting the null hypothesis—meaning that many papers do not seek to prove something conclusively, but instead, to reject the possibility that a variable has no relationship with the effect they are measuring (beyond chance). If that sounds convoluted, it is—there are historical reasons for this methodology and big arguments within academia about its merits, but for the moment, this remains standard practice.
At crucial points during the pandemic, though, this resulted in mistranslations and fueled misunderstandings, which were further muddled by differing stances toward prior scientific knowledge and theory. Yes, we faced a novel coronavirus, but we should have started by assuming that we could make some reasonable projections from prior knowledge, while looking out for anything that might prove different. That prior experience should have made us mindful of seasonality, the key role of overdispersion, and aerosol transmission. A keen eye for what was different from the past would have alerted us earlier to the importance of presymptomatic transmission.
The whole thing is worth a read.
