Short Wave - How The U.S. Is Caught In A "Pandemic Spiral"

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, writes that the U.S. is caught in a "pandemic spiral." He argues some of our intuitions have been misleading our response, rather than guiding us out of disaster. For instance, flitting from from one prominent solution to another, without fully implementing any of them. To counter these unhelpful instincts, he offers some solutions.Read Ed's piece: "America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral".As always, you can reach the show by emailing [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Army ants don't see very well. They navigate by smelling the pheromones laid by other army ants while also laying their own pheromones as they walk. These pheromone trails, if they loop back on themselves by accident, cause the ants to just march in circles until they die from either exhaustion or dehydration. Ed Yong is a science writer for the Atlantic.

And this to me is the perfect metaphor. for America's response to the pandemic because the ants are just walled in by their own instincts. There's nothing keeping them in circles other than that they can only sense what is immediately in front of them. They have no sense of the bigger picture, no sense with the future, and no coordinating force to guide them out of this endless fatal spiral. In his latest piece, Ed argues that this spiral is happening here in the U.S. because we've really been playing catch-up with the virus. We are reacting and responding

instead of consistently planning and preventing, which has put us in what he calls an intuition nightmare. So it means that we keep on thinking about the pandemic in the wrong ways. Our attitudes, our intuitions for what is happening are also leading us astray. So we tend to bounce from one thing to the other without putting in a web of measures. And unless we start thinking about the problem in different and better ways that match the magnitude of the challenge in front of us,

we're going to continue making bad decisions and bad policies. And I mean we here to be everything from you and I and our listeners to the people in the White House. These errors in judgment aren't specific to the coronavirus pandemic. It's just particularly good at revealing this behavior. in all of us because of things like... The scope and the pace of it for a start. When the coronavirus reached the U.S., it spread throughout the entire country wasn't immediately apparent. It came in waves.

And once people start spreading the virus, it takes a while for the consequences of those risky behaviors to manifest in obvious statistics. And, you know, finally, the stakes are so high. still know so little because this virus is new. So we are trapped in these loops of fear and anxiety. We look for more information. We find only uncertainty and doubt. And that makes us more vulnerable to a lot of these conceptual errors, these problems of intuition. The good news is that this spiral, these problems of intuition, can be broken. Yes, in principle, we should be able to do better than the because we can look to the future, because we can learn from our own mistakes.

So today on the show, we talk to Ed Young about some of the errors of intuition that have hamstrung the U.S.'s response to the pandemic and what needs to happen next. I'm Maddie Safaya, and this is Shortwave from NPR. Okay, so let's walk through some of these conceptual mistakes that we've made when we're thinking about the pandemic. You call them errors of intuition. We've talked about some of them on the show before, and we don't have time for all of them because we're making a lot of mistakes out here. You know what I mean? Right, right. So let's start with the first one that you mentioned, the serial monogamy of solutions.

Basically, this idea that we're really only good at focusing on one solution at a time. Absolutely. So, you know, when in March, we were all focused on stay-at-home orders quite reasonably. In April, everyone started talking about masks. In May, there were hundreds of pieces about contact tracing. Now we're talking about ventilation. We just seem to bounce from one thing to the other. But in reality, we need to do all of these things at the same time.

And this instinct, I think, is made much worse by Donald Trump and by others who are specifically touting biomedical solutions like hydroxychloroquine. That will just fix it. That will end the pandemic without us having to put in the... effort needed to do everything else. And of course, that's not how it's going to work. We need all those other things and we need to do them all at once. Yeah, yeah. And this is tied in with your next error in judgment that you've talked about, this belief in false dichotomies to kind of see things as black and white when really they're not. And one that I see really, like I've seen since the beginning, is this idea of choosing between the economy or safety and this idea that we can't

really have both. Right. Yes. And that dichotomy was, you know, was promoted in the press. It was promoted by Trump repeatedly. And it's just false. Like both epidemiologists and economists in the main were united in understanding that you can't save the economy if there's a pandemic around. So you have to treat the two of those as if they were aligned because they absolutely are. And, you know, this false dichotomy is still with us. It means that now that cases are still rising in the Midwest, the pandemic is still not under control, folks are still saying, okay, but, you know, we can't go back into a lockdown again. That's not the only option on the table.

You can close down high-risk venues like restaurants and bars. while hopefully also supporting those businesses that will be hurt. But it's not just a case of shut everything down or open everything up. There's a lot of gray area in between. If we don't understand that, then we end up making bad choices. Right, right. You know, and another thing that I hadn't thought of that you had in this piece is our next error in judgment, and that's the complacency of inexperience.

For example, you know, how countries who have had more experience with these types of epidemics reacted versus how the U.S. reacted. Yeah. Countries in places like East Asia that more frequently encounter epidemics of new viral diseases took things much more seriously than the U.S. did. And in many ways, we have been consistently slow to take up measures like masks that were widespread in use in other. the places. But, you know, that only partly explains the American experience because even when the pandemic was spreading within the U.S., in places that weren't initially hit, a lot of places in the South and the Midwest were very slow to put in the sort of measures that, you know, they just sort of assumed that they seemed to assume that the virus wasn't going to hit them in

the way that it hit, like, coastal states. And, you know, it's a lot of. And, you know, it's, it eventually did in a very, very predictable way. But there's this consistent problem that unless your community is sick, or at last like you yourself or your loved ones are directly being affected, people underestimate the risk. And I find it like a catastrophic failure of empathy, that unless, you know, we ourselves have personally experienced this thing, we don't react with the urgency that is demanded of us.

Yeah. Okay, so we just spent a bunch of time talking about all the mistakes in the mindset that we've had. And the beautiful thing about this is theoretically, we can change that. So what is the right way to think about this, Ed? How do we reframe this in order to give ourselves our best shot? Yeah, so, you know, we need to understand that we need to do all the things. So masking, rapid testing, contact tracing. Not all of us individually can do all those things, but we need to push for them and we need to do everything that we personally can. So, you know, I'm just wearing masks when I can. I'm, you know, still avoiding crowded indoor spaces. I'm, you know, I'm restricting my, my contacts. I think we also need to understand that we don't just get to bounce back to normal. We all really want it. but this world in which COVID-19 exist is fundamentally different from the one before it existed. And we need to accept that. I know it's really hard.

But unless we do, we're just going to make the same mistakes. We are going to think that we can do everything that we used to do without having to sacrifice. And we do need to make sacrifices individually and as a society. And, you know, I would just encourage this. I know this is a bit self-serving, but I would encourage people to read this piece. So I think part of the solution to this is to understand the scope of the problem. And I'm hoping that by laying out these nine errors of intuition

and showing how they've affected us, it gives people a stable place from which to actually resist them. You know, I know that since I've written this piece, I catch myself making these errors. all the time. So I'm hoping that if it helps me, that will help other people to. Yeah. You know, Ed, we've had you on the show before. We consider you a friend of the show. Thank you. And I'm wondering, from a personal perspective, where you're kind of at. Because, you know, as we've talked over these months, I've started to notice, how I put this, like a slight drop in patience for

nonsense. Am I picking up on that correctly? Yeah. You know, it's, you know, it's, This is a very difficult mind space to inhabit. It's a very tragic situation. We don't seem to be able to pull ourselves out of this death spiral that I've written about. Predictions that I and other people in public health have made are coming to pass in a deeply frustrating way. You know, I don't want to be right about this. try very hard to be right while also very much hoping to be wrong. And, you know, it's not fun to continually inhabit this mind space of seeing bad stuff

coming on the horizon, writing about it, and then watching it actually come to pass. So it's deeply frustrating. It is very tragic to watch unfold. You know, I still hope that we can do things differently. We certainly have the capacity to do that. It's not beyond our reach. But we just need to marshal the political and social will to do so. Okay, Ed Young, we always appreciate you.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. If you want to read more, we've linked Ed's piece in the episode notes. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez. edited by Viet Le and fact-checked by our new, excellent intern, Aurella Zabidi. Welcome to the team, Duturino. We are so glad that you're here. I'm Maddie Safaya, and thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

On Facebook, there are these three brothers who love guns. Say guns are over-regulated. Say the NRA is too quick to compromise. And they're gaining more followers every day. They're very in-your-face and offensive. and by God, I love them for it. Listen now to the No Compromise podcast from NPR.