The year in Covid ‘Messages’

Of course it is jargon: 40% of Covid’s cases are asymptomatic; 80% of symptomatic cases are mild and indistinguishable from cold or flu, so the patient has little reason to seek the test. Our borders are porous. So far, we’ve tested only about 80% of Americans at least one time. We would have to test 330 million every few days to detect a useful percentage of Covid cases while they were still infected. Add contact tracking and the numbers are clearly impossible. But since the strategy was useful in the South Korean context, our politicians go through here.

Another mess of messages appeared last summer. Robert Redfield, of the CDC, admitted that our test may be taking only 10% of cases – that is, the circus that fills hours of broadcast in the media is doing nothing to control the epidemic or even measure it.

Officially lying about things big and small has been a staple of Covid’s policy: letters to college students threatening them with prison if they were not quarantined, interstate travel “bans” that were never enforced, death counts that they swept away anyone who died of any cause while infected with Covid.

It probably started on the first day. I don’t go to the doctor because of a cold or the flu, nor 80% to 95% of you. This has implications: since the hospitals in Wuhan were besieged with serious cases, it was a waste of time to ask us if the virus was here. Was here. The blocked flights, the test of recent arrivals were so wavy that our government could be seen doing something.

The mummy served to drown out and dilute a message that politicians did not like to convey: It would be up to us citizens to control Covid in the best possible way.

The blocks are imagined as a kind of forced social distance. They are not. The mandatory closing of companies does not prevent people from spreading the disease. Allowing companies to remain open does not force them to spread the disease.

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

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

No messaging strategy has been more misjudged than the one our politicians selected for a vaccine, deciding that nothing was more important than signaling that no path was being cut.

At the time, I didn’t make any noise because I assumed that any vaccine would only arrive after the initial epidemic devastated society and was extinguished. In fact, we had highly promising candidates days after the virus was sequenced last January. Operation Warp Speed ​​was triumphant in compressing the normal development process in ways that would not make sense with shareholder money. The indisputable now is that we should have discarded the normal process and accepted more vaccine risk in exchange for the potential benefit of saving thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in lost wages in 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 disease surveillance, etc.

Most of this will make no difference when natural selection generates another disease with the properties of Covid-19. The virus was not just transmitted easily; crucially, its effects were mild enough that, for billions of humans, the cost of canceling it outweighed the personal benefit.

This bottom-up truth, our unsightly media spent much of 2020 trying not to understand. Worse, he tried to make this truth go away by frightening or morally intimidating people to adopt behaviors contrary to perceived self-interest.

This proved to be the dead end that usually happens. We need to get smarter. Limited social distance to protect the most vulnerable is the only type that is likely to prove sustainable over time. Most importantly, we will be ready the next time to accept a level of risk in vaccine development commensurate with the potential benefit of stopping such an expensive epidemic sooner or later.