The year at Covid “Messaging”

Of course, it is nonsense: 40% of Covid cases are asymptomatic; 80% of symptomatic cases are mild and are indistinguishable from the common cold or flu, so the patient has little reason to ask for evidence. 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 detect a useful percentage of Covid cases while they are still infectious. Add contact tracking and it is clear that numbers are impossible. But because the strategy was useful in a South Korean context, our politicians go through the motions here.

Another messaging snafu happened last summer. Robert Redfield, of CDC, admitted that our tests could capture only 10% of cases, meaning the circus that fills hours with media coverage does nothing to control the epidemic or even measure it. .

The official lying about big and small things has been a staple of Covid’s policy: letters to college students threatening to arrest them if they are not quarantined, interstate travel “bans” that never applied, the deaths that ravaged anyone who died of any cause while infected with Covid.

You could say it started on the first day. I don’t go to the doctor to have a cold or the flu, nor do 80% to 95% of you. This has implications: once Wuhan hospitals were harassed with serious cases, it was a waste of time to ask ourselves if the virus was here. It was here. Blocked flights, evidence of recent arrivals were very hectic so we could see our government doing something.

The mummy has served to spread and dilute a message that politicians were not happy to deliver: it would be up to us citizens to control Covid as best we can.

Blockages are imagined to be a kind of forced social distancing. They are not. Mandatory closure of companies does not prevent people from spreading the disease. Leaving companies open does not force them to spread the disease.

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

Only recently has this reality crept into public rhetoric, as leaders in New York, Massachusetts, and elsewhere began to admit that their movements had more to do with “signage” than any practical effect.

No messaging strategy was more misjudged than the one our politicians selected for a vaccine, deciding that nothing was more important than indicating that no corners were being cut.

At that time I was unable to make any fuss because I assumed that any vaccine would only arrive after the initial epidemic had ravaged society and burned. In fact, we had very promising candidates days after virus sequencing last January. Operation Warp Speed ​​succeeded in compressing the normal development process in ways that would make no sense with shareholder money. It is now indisputable that we should have set aside the normal process and accepted more risk of vaccination in exchange for the potential benefit of saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in lost wages by 2020.

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

Most will not matter at all when natural selection causes another disease with the properties of Covid-19. The virus was not only easily transmitted; fundamentally, its effects were mild enough that for billions of humans the cost of suffocating it outweighed the personal benefit.

This fundamental truth that our uninformed media spent much of 2020 trying not to understand. Worse still, he tried to make this truth disappear by frightening or morally intimidating people into behaviors contrary to perceived self-interest.

This turned out to be the dead end he usually does. We need to be smart. Limited social distancing to protect the most vulnerable is the only one that is likely to be sustainable over time. Most importantly, we are prepared next time to accept a level of risk in vaccine development commensurate with the potential benefit of stopping such a costly epidemic sooner rather than later.