Letting the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Better-Than-Expected
Last year's best-case scenario is this year's dystopian nightmare.
I’m trying not to fill this space with endless bitching about media coverage of the Covid situation, but it’s really, really hard. As previously noted, I have two kids who are about to start school next week, one of them still un-vaccinate-able, and I work at a college where classes will start a week and a bit after that, so I’ve got a big stake in general health and safety. And on top of that, a lot of what’s out there is just really, really bad in ways that are corrosive to public health, both medical and mental.
This Twitter thread includes a collection of examples of recent scary headlines that are directly undermined by facts in the story:
That’s not the main thing leading me to put fingers to keyboard this morning, though. What particularly struck me about this, and several other stories circulating through my feeds of late, is that what they’re complaining about is the best-case scenario from last spring.
That is, back when all this started in March and April of 2020, I remember endless repetitions of a particular set of talking points about what to expect. People kept saying that development and rollout of a new vaccine usually takes 18-24 months, and that nobody had ever successfully made a vaccine against a coronavirus before, so it might not even be possible. At best, they said, we might be looking at a flu-shot situation where it’s a constant fight to keep up with new strains, and annual shots that are maybe 60% effective, if that.
If you read the news now, much of it coming from the very same people, that April 2020 best-case is now the scary bad scenario. We’ve got a large chunk of the population vaccinated with vaccines whose efficacy at preventing infection might be dropping toward the high end of what we were told might be possible. They reduce the chance of hospitalization by almost a factor of 30, and the chance of death from Covid has probably dropped more than that as doctors have figured out more about how to treat it in the last year. That’s crazy good compared to where we thought we were headed a year and a half ago.
And that’s on top of a vastly better situation in terms of our understanding of the disease and its spread. We’re long past the days of buying only non-perishable food and having the delivery guy leave it in the sun on the porch for three days before bringing it into the house. (Though, sadly, still not over complaining about people doing stuff outside…) We know how the virus spreads, and what relatively modest precautions are needed to greatly reduce the risk of catching it. We know that it’s possible to resume in-person schooling, because we’ve already done it for a year, and vaccines should make the safety requirements somewhat less onerous this year.
And look, people are idiots, especially in Florida, I get that. There are a lot of needless infections, hospitalizations, and deaths happening because some people are refusing to take the simple and low-cost steps necessary to protect themselves and their neighbors, often for the very dumbest reasons imaginable. It’s absolutely maddening.
That does not mean, though, that we’re in a worse situation than we were at the start of the pandemic. We are so much better off right now, in terms of our ability to protect ourselves from this virus, than we had any reason to expect a year and a half ago. If you had told me in April 2020 that I could get a shot that would reduce my chances of dying by a factor of 30, but I’d need an annual booster and might still get a mildly symptomatic case, I would’ve taken that deal in a nanosecond. Now, this is a dark future to freak out about?
What we’ve got here is the very rare inverse of the boiling frog scenario (which is a myth, anyway, I know, just roll with it): the background conditions have gotten steadily better, but everybody is freaking out just as much. And large chunks of the media are directly to blame for this, because the deeply ingrained norms of journalism push them toward a constant level of negativity in their coverage that’s making everybody crazy.
I really am trying not to write the same piece over and over, but, um, at least this one’s short? Anyway, if you’d like more of this, here’s a button:
If you’d like to send it to someone else, here’s a different button:
And as always, the comments will be open if you just want to yell at me.
You and I are definitely in the same space on this. I'm genuinely puzzled by the intensity of fear and anxiety right now among people who have been claiming to follow the science, etc. but who seem to me at the moment to be sifting through some relatively comforting facts to find the worst news they can.
I don't mean to make light of the continuing issues here which are worse for some people than others. (I mean, I'm not sanguine about it all myself considering that I'm a fat guy in his fifties with high blood pressure. Even vaccinated, I have at least a bit to worry about still.) But the basic picture is good for the vaccinated. You can be a carrier, you might have a breakthrough reaction, but your chances of serious illness have been dramatically reduced. Not eliminated, but it's pretty close to the point where covid's about as worrisome as a significant number of *other* infectious diseases that are risks in everyday life in many parts of the US--colds, flu, walking pneumonia, strep, West Nile, Lyme, norovirus, mono, etc., all of which can develop complications that are life-threatening or debilitating. With most of those, you can follow some precautions that are sensible (wear long pants with permethrin treatment in tick-prone areas, get the flu vaccine when its available, wear repellant and reduce your time outside at night, get checked if you have a persistent sore throat, etc.)
But every year pre-covid, a lot of us who teach have developed bad colds or respiratory infections (as do our students) that in some years might seriously affect your health for a week or two or more. We all cope with it--a person who is immunocompromised due to chemo or some other reason might take a semester off or wear a mask or do something else to reduce exposure threat, in the ordinary circumstances of pre-covid life. I don't recall anybody seriously asking for mandatory hand-washing policies, mandatory use of sanitary wipes on entering classrooms, mandatory masking, mandatory symptom reporting, etc. in response to regular threats of contagion because most of us grasp that this level of response is unsustainable.
I feel as if alongside the level of fear and anxiety that we've all built up, much of it understandable, there's also folks who are wrestling with the unexpected emotional weight of the discovery that they actually would rather go on working from home. For a lot of staff work maybe that's sustainable. For 500-person lecture classes at large universities, maybe Zoom is honestly not all that different a platform than a gigantic lecture hall. But for residential colleges and universities with lots of small classes, labs, etc.? We gotta be there if we want the show to go on at all--it's the basic propositional value of the whole thing.
I also think in our worlds at least that there are some folks who are more attached than they know to the signifying value of masks and distancing in terms of civic virtue--who have liked moving through a world where that shows you to be a person who cares about others and behaves responsibly while providing you the spectacle of people towards whom you can feel justified disdain.