The Terrible Toll of a Low-Information Society
Posted on Mar 14, 2020 by Trevor in Misc, Science
There’s a good chance the hospitals in the US are brought to their knees in the next 10 days. There are still plenty of friends and family of mine posting jokes and comments on social media about COVID-19 that indicate they aren’t taking it seriously. Many of these people are the types that consume Fox on cable TV uncritically. Others are of the persuasion that, while Trump may not be a great guy, he’s correct to argue that “the media” is untrustworthy.
The success of the Brexit vote has often been labeled a victory against expertise. That is, people dismissed the warnings of economists and foreign policy experts because they feared immigrants were overrunning the country, they vaguely sensed their national identity was being lost, or some other reason.
Donald Trump and his administration routinely tell whoppers in high profile settings, yet there’s a never-ending stream of bootlickers to praise and spin their words, polish their turds, and drown the public in confusion.
Anti-vaxxers have never had it better. They can spend years browsing the web, hopping from one seemingly authoritative site to another, in order to confirm their conspiracies.
We went from the Information Age to the Misinformation Age some time ago, and it’s apparent that hoards of people have no substantive sense of how to distinguish which pieces of information are credible from those that aren’t. The concept of a philosophy of information literacy is something I suspect is alien to most.
We disregard the scientists that have been warning us for decades about global warming because their dire predictions don’t align with our day-to-day tangible experiences and/or because what they say we have to change is too hard. Well, it’s apparent that our country has failed to adequately prepare for this coronavirus outbreak, and countless people still resist the unanimous recommendations of healthcare experts.
Thank God the LDS Church is taking it seriously and taking decisive actions. That alone has persuaded lots of skeptics. Yet even as I type this post, numerous family and friends on social media mock the “overreaction” and decry the inconvenience of the minimal numbers of school closures we’ve started to see, or the cancellation of concerts or sports events.
We’re most likely going to be ravaged. Spain is expected to introduce lockdown measures today, in a futile effort to avoid Italy’s fate, and we’re on the same trajectory as both of those countries. People I know are going to die or experience the death of their own loved ones. Survivors may suffer from permanent lung damage (we still don’t have any idea of long-term effects of this virus).
I worry for my sisters and brother-in-law that are healthcare workers. I worry for my parents and my grandparents who are old enough to fall into the statistical danger area of this virus. I worry about the fragile state of our ostensibly sophisticated society, with our fragile supply chains and tenuous sense that “everything is just going to be okay”.
No, “not everyone is going to die”, as my aunt so unfortunately framed it. But lots of people will. I’m not ready to part with my parents or in-laws, or other younger people in my life that may suffer atypical complications from an infection. I’m not ready for anyone in my family to take on permanent health complications.
I really hope my sense of the upcoming weeks is wrong. I’ve spent way too much time reading the chatter amongst epidemiologists over the last month, looking for evidence that this won’t be so bad. Hoping for evidence that we’ve somehow dodged the evil scenario depicted in the logarithmic graphs. I hope.
