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 colds or flu. The sufferer therefore has little reason to investigate. Our boundaries are porous. So far we have tested only about 80% of Americans even once. We need to test 330 million every few days to catch a useful percentage of Covid cases while they are still contagious. Add contact tracing, and the numbers are clearly impossible. But because the strategy was useful in a South Korean context, our politicians are going through it here.

Another message snafu penetrated last summer. CDC’s Robert Redfield conceded that our testing can only capture 10% of cases – ie the circus that fills hours of media airtime does nothing to control or even measure the epidemic.

Official lies about big and small things were an important aspect of Covid politics: the letters to university students threatening them with arrest if they were not quarantined, the ‘ban’ of interstate travel that was never enforced, the death toll that all who fell away died of any cause while infected with Covid.

It probably started on the first day. I do not go to the doctor for colds or flu, nor do 80% to 95% of you. It has implications: After Wuhan hospitals were besieged by serious cases, it was a waste of time to ask ourselves if the virus was here. It was here. The blocked flights, the testing of recent arrivals waved so much by hand that our government could be seen doing something.

The mummery has expressed and diluted the message that politicians unfortunately had: it is up to our citizens to control Covid best.

Prevention is supposed to be a kind of forced social distance. They are not. Compulsory businesses do not include people to spread the disease. Leaving businesses open does not force them to spread the disease.

People spread the disease according to their own decisions, moment by moment, about when, where and how to expose themselves to risks.

Only recently has this reality crept into public rhetoric, as leaders in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere have begun to acknowledge that their moves are more about “signaling” than any practical effect.

No message strategy was judged worse than the one our politicians chose for a vaccine, deciding that nothing is more important than indicating that no corners are being cut.

I did not make a fuss at the time because I assumed that any vaccine would only come after the initial epidemic devastated society and burned itself out. In fact, we had many promising candidates days after the virus was followed up last January. Operation Warp Speed ​​was triumphant in compressing the normal development process in ways that would not make sense with shareholder money. It is now indisputable that we should have downloaded the normal process and accepted more vaccination risk in exchange for the prospective benefit of saving thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in lost wages in 2020.

At the end of the year, experts everywhere preached on the lessons of the pandemic: the need to change our relationship with nature, the need for more disease surveillance, and so on.

Most of them will at least not matter if natural selection produces another disease with the properties of Covid-19. The virus could not only be easily transmitted; the consequences were mild enough that the cost of destruction for billions of people outweighed the personal benefit.

This insignificant truth has taken our inconspicuous media much of 2020 to try to understand. Worse, it tried to make this truth disappear by scaring people or morally bullying into behaviors that were contrary to the supposed self-interest.

It turns out to be the dead end that it usually does. We need to make smart. Limited social distance to protect the most vulnerable is the only kind that can be sustainable over time. Most importantly, next time, let us be ready to accept a level of risk in the development of vaccines that matches the potential benefit of stopping such an expensive epidemic sooner rather than later.