As a veteran of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic (yes, kids, they happen), I know how difficult it is to balance awareness with overhype, especially in the current low risk high impact situation. So let’s go over some helpful lessons from professional risk communicators I worked with and learned from. For example, in this classic Peter Sandman book:
Responding to Community Outrage: Strategies for Effective Risk Communication
By 1987, however, it was clear that the distinction of consuming importance to industry and government risk managers was slightly different: the risks that worry the experts as opposed to the risks that worry the public...
Health and safety educators had long worried about how to persuade an apathetic public to take risks seriously enough. But the parallel problem of what to do when the public is excessively concerned was newly central to risk managers in government and industry.
Here’s another from Sandman:
In my terms, “hazard” is how dangerous a risk is, while “outrage” is how upsetting it is. Thus:
- When hazard is high and outrage is low, the paradigm is “precaution advocacy” – alerting insufficiently upset people to serious risks. “Watch out!”
- When hazard is low and outrage is high, the paradigm is “outrage management” – reassuring excessively upset people about small risks. “Calm down.”
- When hazard is high and outrage is also high, the paradigm is “crisis communication” – helping appropriately upset people cope with serious risks. “We’ll get through this together.”
- And when hazard and outrage are both intermediate, you’re in the “sweet spot” where risk communication is easy (though still worthwhile) – unhurriedly chatting with interested people about moderate risks. “Here’s what we know….”
Flu is high hazard and low outrage so we practice precaution advocacy (get your flu shot, it’s not too late). So are poor eating habits, and smoking, or drinking alcohol during pregnancy. With coronavirus, we are slowly but inexorably moving from the outrage management to the intermediate phase, though some folks are in the midst of crisis communication as you read this:
I write all this to answer the inevitable “why are you panicking” comments, “why don’t you concentrate on cholera or something else widespread that’s the *real* issue?” that accompany any attempt to risk communicate. I would simply remind people that false assurances are a ticket to disaster.
Ian MacKay (virologist):
So you think you’re about to be in a pandemic?
We’re not in a pandemic now
For now, you are more than likely not living in an area experiencing widespread community transmission of SARS-CoV-2. If more cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) keep rapidly appearing, and more of them can’t be traced to existing transmission chains, the efforts in some countries to contain COVID-19 will have failed.
At some point, we’ll be in the main phase of a pandemic; epidemics of an efficiently transmitting pathogen spreading widely within the community of two or more countries, apart from the first one to report it.[1] A pandemic doesn’t necessarily mean the disease is severe. Also, this word may bring to the attention an event that some still manage to ignore when softer words are used. And let’s face it if we don’t start using this possibly scary word and talking about and planning for the possibilities now – how much more panic and fear will result because we were taken totally by surprise?
For once, let’s get ahead of what’s coming.
WaPo:
Market plunge over coronavirus fears underscores political risk to Trump
The Trump administration’s disjointed handling of the outbreak has faced mounting criticism as the president’s allies have scrambled to take preventive steps while seeking to reassure the public, at times struggling to explain their decisions and offer a consistent message.
The president’s strategy of publicly downplaying the threat that the virus poses to the United States was undermined Monday as the Dow Jones industrial average — a measure he follows closely — shed more than 1,000 points for its largest drop in two years. Investors acted on growing fears of a worldwide pandemic as the virus took hold in multiple countries, threatening to disrupt global commerce.
And then the market dropped again.
We do not wish a coronavirus pandemic to damage Trump’s presidency. We wish we didn’t have a damaged president in charge of a coronavirus.
James Hamblin/Atlantic:
You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus
Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.
[Epidemiologist Marc] Lipsitch predicts that, within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, around 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)
Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”
👇👇👇
In other news…
Catherine Rampell/WaPo:
A socialist is likely to win the 2020 election. No, not Bernie Sanders.
It once seemed unimaginable, but a proven socialist looks quite likely to win the 2020 presidential election.
No, I’m not talking about that socialist. I’m referring to the one who already occupies the White House.
For three years, “Never Trump” Republicans told us that President Trump was so despicable, so corrupt, so contemptuous of the rule of law that they’d hold their noses and vote for anyone the Democrats nominated to challenge him. Lately, many Never Trumpers have become Hardly-Ever Trumpers, deciding that one Democratic candidate is beyond the pale: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the self-proclaimed democratic socialist.
1. media cannot handle nuance and B. older voters vote heavily. These are not right/wrong statements, they are political reality If you want to change that reality, or at least counter B., you gotta show up. maybe we all do. But we don’t know that we will, yet, and that makes people very nervous. Especially white people.
David Frum/Atlantic:
The Price of a Sanders Nomination
Nancy Pelosi’s majority is new, fragile, and dependent on voters who are more conservative than the median Democrat.
Sanders supporters take as an article of faith that Sanders will win votes from working-class voters who swung to Trump in 2016. This idea is based on a single data-point: Some 10 to 12 percent of those who voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary then voted for Trump in the general election. If Sanders could have held all those primary voters in a general election, and also if he had won everybody who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary, then he would have defeated Trump. But once you state the two ifs, you see the problem.
The political scientist Brian Schaffner, who closely studied these Sanders-Trump switchers, finds that they were older white voters with conservative racial views. As compared with other Sanders voters, the Sanders-Trump switchers were much more likely to deny that white people enjoy special advantages in American society. They were also much less positive about President Obama than were Sanders voters who did not switch to Trump…
Meanwhile, it’s very hard to identify congressional districts where the hypothetical return of Sanders-to-Trump voters to the Democratic column would swing the district—and it’s easy to identify many where discomfort with Sanders could swing the district back to the Republican column.
Vox:
Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage
New research suggests Sanders would drive swing voters to Trump — and need a youth turnout miracle to compensate.
Why does Sanders look similarly electable to leading moderates in polls against Trump? We fielded a 40,000-person survey in early 2020 that helps us look into this question with more precision. We asked Americans to choose between Trump and one of the leading Democratic candidates: Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Mike Bloomberg.
So that respondents would not strategically claim to only support their chosen candidate against Trump, we only asked each respondent about one Democratic candidate. The surveys were fielded by Lucid, an online market-research company that provides nationally representative samples of Americans.
Our data (laid out in an academic working paper here) also found what polls show: that Bernie Sanders is similarly electable to more moderate candidates. But, on closer inspection, it shows that this finding relies on some remarkable assumptions about youth turnout that past elections suggest are questionable.