Early on in the Covid-19 pandemic (Feb. 29, 2020) we linked to an article that looked at possible futures if society were confronted by really bad diseases rather than one where we have the luxury of not vaccinating the elderly as a priority because those cohorts are too white*:
"Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema"
A great resource for portfolio risk managers.
As just one example, what is the trade if the world is confronted by a real-life version of "Blindness (2008, Fernando Meirelles), which deals with a fictional disease that causes epidemic blindness, leading to collective hysteria?"
I mean beyond the simplistic "short Luxottica." Duh.
From Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal, Volume 26, Number 2—February 2020:....MORE
And the headline story from Palladium Magazine:
The year is 1950. A dead body floats along the New Orleans waterfront. The coroner who examines him realizes something terrifying: this nameless man died sick. The corpse is infected with the pneumonic plague. The city authorities now have 48 hours to find and inoculate every person who came in contact with the man before his death or New Orleans will become the epicenter of a terrible epidemic. At a crisis meeting of the city council, one councilor argues that the only way to save the city is to announce to the public what has happened and seek their cooperation. But the local public health officer—the hero of this story—begs the mayor not to go public with the news. The citizens of New Orleans must be kept in the dark. The press must be kept quiet. The title of the film reveals what he fears will occur if the public discovers the truth: Panic in the Streets.
The story beats charted out in the 1950 film Panic in the Streets have been repeated in every disaster film that has followed it. Experts discover a looming catastrophe of incredible proportions. They race to solve the problem as covertly as possible; to do otherwise would invite a panic more disastrous than the disaster itself. If they fail, audiences get to see images of an unnerved public up close. Society descends into a Hobbesian scramble for resources or open riot against the powers that be. The lesson is clear: the key to disaster response is ensuring the public does not feel fear. Normal citizens who understand the danger they are in will pose a threat to everyone else in calamity’s path. Panic is the true disaster. Disaster management is thus, at its core, a problem of narrative control.
This understanding of disaster is not limited to Hollywood blockbusters. Over the last year, we have seen the consequences of prioritizing panic prevention over disaster response in one country after another. The pattern was set early in Wuhan, China. There, provincial and municipal officials muzzled early warnings of a novel respiratory illness from doctors, virologists, and health officials. They feared what might happen if normal citizens became aware of the disease. “When we first discovered it could be transmitted between people, our hospital head, chairman, medical affairs department, they sat and made endless calls to the city government, the health commission,” wrote one Wuhan nurse in January of 2020. “[But] they said we still can’t wear protective clothing, because it might stir up panic.”
Similar concerns prompted China’s National Health Commission to issue a confidential notice forbidding labs that had sequenced the new virus to publish their data without government authorization. Even as China’s top health official warned the Chinese health system to prepare for the “most severe challenge since SARS in 2003” and ordered the Chinese CDC to declare the highest emergency level possible, public-facing officials were still reporting that the likelihood of sustained transmission between humans was low.
The Chinese continually stalled WHO teams trying to gather information on the pandemic; it was not until the last week of January that Chinese health officials told the WHO the reason for their stonewalling. These officials conceded to the WHO team that they required help “communicating this to the public, without causing panic.” The WHO was sensitive to Beijing’s concerns and delayed its declaration of a global health emergency for several days. “You’ve got to remember this was a novel virus,” one member of a WHO delegation then tasked with the China response would say. “You don’t want to push the panic button until you’ve got reasonable confidence in your diagnosis.”
Unlike Chinese news sites, ordered to censor sensitive words in their reports to prevent coverage of the new disease from fomenting “societal panic,” American newspapers did not operate under the purview of an official censorship regime. But they too were afraid to “push the panic button.” With titles like “Should You Panic About the Coronavirus? Experts Say No” (The LA Times), “The Flu is a Bigger Threat” (NPR), “The Cognitive Bias That Makes Us Panic About the Coronavirus” (Bloomberg), and “The Pandemic Risks Bringing out the Worst In Humanity” (CNN), American magazines and newspapers led the charge to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak and delegitimize fear of it. In a piece from The New York Times titled “Beware the Pandemic Panic,” Farhad Manjoo described the reasoning behind this push: “What worries me more than the new disease is that fear of a vague and terrifying new illness might spiral into panic.”
This attitude was widely shared by the public servants responsible for preparing America for the pandemic to come. Most famously, Donald Trump was aware that the coronavirus was more dangerous than the flu, but refused to raise the alarm because, as he told journalist Bob Woodward, “I don’t want people to be frightened, I don’t want to create panic, as you say, and certainly I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy.”
But Trump was hardly the only politician to take this stance. As New York City became the center of the American pandemic, the city’s health commissioner successfully argued against lockdowns on the grounds that if New Yorkers became “fearful due to messaging, we could have more permanent harm than we currently have with Covid-19.” That same month, California public health officials argued against wearing masks for fear they might “add to a climate of alarm.” This same argument would reappear a month later when White House officials worried that a mask mandate “might cause panic.”
Perhaps they remembered attacks levied at them by Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot a few weeks earlier: “I will candidly tell you that I was very disappointed with the comments of the CDC yesterday and members of the Trump administration around coronavirus,” she remarked after the CDC announced that Americans should prepare for the worst. “I want to make sure that people understand they should continue to go about their normal lives…we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves and suggest to the public that there’s a reason for them to be fearful.”
Why this fear of panic? What would have been wrong with allowing the public to feel afraid? Contrary to Lightfoot’s reassurances, there was a reason for the citizens of Chicago—and the rest of us—to “be fearful.” Yet leaders on both sides of the Pacific, at both the local and national levels, among both the politicians and the opinion-makers, were determined to keep their people as far away from fear as possible.
Events proved the anxieties of these elites unfounded: when cities in China, Europe, and finally the United States descended into lockdown, there was no mass panic. There was fear, yes, plenty of it—but that fear did not lead to irrational, hysterical, or violent group behavior. Our fear did not lead to looting, pogroms, or unrest. The fearful of Wuhan did not rise up in rebellion against the Communist Party; even when Italian doctors began rationing medical equipment and supplies, the fearful of Milan did not loot stores or disrupt the medical system; the fearful of New York did not duel each other to the death over toilet paper rolls.
The social “panic” that disturbed mayors, presidents, columnists, and Communists never materialized. It never does. Time and resources that could have been devoted to combatting a very real pandemic were wasted combatting an imaginary social phenomenon. In 2020, we all learned the perils of the myth of panic.
The Fear of the CrowdAcute fear of the mass of common men by the elites who govern them is not novel. To one extent or another, such distrust exists in any society divided by lines of class and caste. But as a great sea of humanity poured into the new industrial centers of Europe and America in the late 19th century, a distinctly dark vision of mass behavior took root. No work captured this vision more completely than Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. By the time Le Bon published The Crowd, he was already regarded as a pioneering figure in social science, famous for his anthropological accounts of India and Arabia. Violent industrial strikes and the bloody course of the Paris commune turned the focus of his studies back towards his own people. In the concept of “the crowd,” Le Bon found an explanation for the troubles of his country. This explanation was enormously influential with Western intellectuals in the early 20th century. It took root just as disaster response began to be studied as a discrete field—and it still stalks us today.....
....MUCH MORE
*"Harald Schmidt,
an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of
Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead
of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately
minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society
is structured in a way that enables them to live longer.
Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had
more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
But to protect older people more at risk, he called on the C.D.C. committee to also integrate the agency’s own “social vulnerability index.”
—NYT, Dec. 5, 2020
Absolutely
vaccinate healthcare workers first. It's like the flight attendants
say: "Put on your oxygen mask first cuz if you pass out you're no help
for the kids" Gotta have those doctors and nurses healthy.
Related, a week after the Blindness post in the introduction:
Coronavirus and Equities: "Nobody Knows Anything"
And news you can use:"The Fuzzy Logic of Fleeing for Your Life"
