Joseph Sternberg has a very interesting column in the WSJ. Interesting particularly from the viewpoint of communication. Sternberg’s thesis is that political establishments have been busy, in the last few years, in “Project Fear” rhetoric: they tried to caution the populace against political breakthroughs, like Brexit, appealing to disastrous consequences that ultimately did not materialize (happily, the world is more complex and more resilient than we pundits believe).
Now with COVID19 they are playing along the same lines. There are two problems with this. The first is that it may have the usual consequences of crying wolf: i.e., people get bored by fear, and then when a truly fearful situation appears they end up not paying attention. The second is that scare tactics become path-dependent: as you denounced the sky was about to fall before, you cannot adjust to new evidence and so better trim policies. This is potentially disastrous since lockdowns have jeopardized economic activity to a degree far more conspicuous than anything we have seen before.
Writes Sternberg:
policy makers are letting themselves be guided less by “the science”—which remains preliminary and conflicting—than by a perceived public clamor for a draconian response to the pandemic. The important word is “perceived,” since whatever outcry exists has been filtered through a media eager to hype the fear factor.
The longer the crisis drags on, the less natural that fear seems. We now know the virus is not nearly as deadly as early data from China suggested. Doctors are developing more-effective treatment protocols, and some drugs have shown early promise. Deepening research into which traits make people more vulnerable to the disease allows for more finely honed shielding measures.All of that should trigger a modulation of the fear surrounding the coronavirus—not a denial of the severity of the disease, but an understanding that new insights bring the prospect of new ways to balance risk while reopening stalled economies.
That modulation isn’t happening among the media or many political officials, and even some members of the public, because Project Fear is too appealing as a means by which to attempt to control public behavior, and as a method for virtue signaling.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
May 9 2020 at 1:08pm
I don’t know what kind of special insight Mr. Sternberg has. There are no drugs with early promise. Remdesivir seems only to shorten hospital stays and does not impact mortality. Most other trials have shown no efficacy or are statistically under-powered to be worthless. As to “more effective treatment protocols,” I have not seen anything in 8 weeks of reading preprints that points to this being true.
The only thing that would assuage the fear factor is a better knowledge of the Case Report Fatality (CRF). As long as people see the number as 6% they won’t be comforted much. The national government doesn’t want to do the necessary testing to show that this number is at least an order of magnitude lower than that. The irony in all this is the few field epidemiological studies that have been done showing much higher rates of community infection get attacked by everyone for poor sampling methods, use of inaccurate diagnostic tools, poor statistical analysis. These are the studies everyone should be celebrating (assuming they are done correctly) as they show COVID-19 to be worse than the seasonal flu but not nearly as bad as the 1918-19 Spanish Flu.
As long as there is a fear factor, people will be very conservative in their actions.
Mark Brophy
May 9 2020 at 10:23pm
Health food stores and Amazon are short on vitamin C because it boosts the immune system. Most people who become sick are short on vitamin D. Zinc also helps the immune system and zinc glycinate absorbs well. It’s better to prevent than to treat sickness.
Alan Goldhammer
May 10 2020 at 9:36am
As I have a spot on my right retina, I have been taking AREDS-2 vitamin mix for the past three years. Vitamins C & E, zinc, copper, and two antioxidant plant pigments. I think this is why I am resistant to COVID-19. It has also stopped the progression of the macula problem. I also suffer from hay fever and have a lot of nasal mucous and mild upper respiratory phlegm. I hypothesize that the mucous binds COVID-19 more strongly than the ACE2 receptors in my body. I am also of Ashkenazim heritage and a paper I read yesterday shows that most of these people have a mutation in their ACE2 receptor that leads to weaker binding of the virus. Finally, I take fexofenidine which has come up in several drug repurposing studies as inhibitor of COVID-19 but this latter point is less certain as there is no in vitro evidence that it works.
This is what you get from reading 8 solid weeks worth of COVID-19 technical papers.
Philo
May 10 2020 at 1:24pm
“[M]ost of these people [Ashkenazim] have a mutation in their ACE2 receptor that leads to weaker binding of the virus.” Finally, God is giving His Chosen People a break?
Phil H
May 9 2020 at 1:20pm
It’s possible that this is a reasonable argument. But seeing as libertarians have the endearing habit of yelling SOCIALISM RUSSIA CAMBODIA MASSACRE at fairly regular intervals, I myself could not take this “fearmongering” argument seriously from this source.
Jon Murphy
May 9 2020 at 7:57pm
Neither the WSJ nor Mr Sternberg are libertarian.
So, now that your ad hominem is out of the way, can you address the argument at hand?
Phil H
May 10 2020 at 3:12am
Nope. You’re exactly correct, it is an ad hom. I stated so myself! It’s a serious ad hom – a version of the “boy who cried wolf”. If a certain group of people is prone to making a certain kind of fallacious argument, they will lose traction if they try to accuse other people of that fallacy.
I feel that way about libertarians. If you look at this website, you will find many articles explicitly comparing Bernie Sanders with Soviet Russia. Therefore I feel no interest in engaging with a “project fear” claim from anyone here. And I popped by to say it!
Jon Murphy
May 11 2020 at 10:18am
Except the original WSJ article is not an ad hominem. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is not an ad hominem.
Your objection is both incorrect and irrelevant.
JFA
May 9 2020 at 6:52pm
“This is potentially disastrous since lockdowns have jeopardized economic activity to a degree far more conspicuous than anything we have seen before.” While I think lockdowns should start being relaxed, it seems wrong to blame all the decrease of economic activity on the lockdown. I’d imagine we’d have seen a sizable decrease in the absence of government policy shutting places down. The real issue is the inflexibility and ad hoc nature of these policies when it comes to lifting the restrictions.
I’ve seen many people blaming the decrease in economic activity on these policies. Let’s not ruin good points by spouting bad points.
Alan Goldhammer
May 10 2020 at 9:39am
Correct point. I have not seen any economic modeling of the impact of large employee absenteeism. the only examples we have outside the health care sector is with the meat processing plants where production in some cases has dropped to zero with the closure of facilities. I would dearly love to see the economists stop pretending to be epidemiologist and address these real world employment issues.
Rolling closures are not good for the economy.
Walter Boggs
May 10 2020 at 11:44am
I agree. A lot of people simply don’t want to get the virus and are willingly avoiding social situations they see as risky. I and many of my friends were doing this before any lockdowns were mandated. I’m not sure where we show up in the statistics.
Thomas Hutcheson
May 10 2020 at 12:41pm
How certain is Mingardi that Brexit will not result in the kind of Econ 101 harm that most economists predicted (not “feared”)?
It would certainly have been better for local (not state or national) politicians to have said, “Here are some unpleasant measures we have to take to keep from overwhelming the health care systems” and then a few weeks later say “OK, it looks like we can back off a little for now. Stay tuned as we dealt this up or down.”
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