Why were so few sufficiently alarmed about the coronavirus threat as it emerged, and why were those raising the alarm largely dismissed or sidelined? dwallacewells writes
Photo: John Paraskevas/Newsday via Getty Images A bit before midnight on January 20, a Harvard epidemiologist named Eric Feigl-Ding posted a long, terrifying Twitter thread mostly summarizing, and in a few places contextualizing, a new, pre-publication paper on the infectiousness of the novel coronavirus that had, at the time, forced Wuhan into a total lockdown but had not yet been detected outside of China. The context he added was, mostly, alarmism.
There may be particular questions, in other words, about particular data points and comparisons contained in Feigl-Ding’s rushed thread — though it’s worth pointing out that even in the initial thread, he suggested the true R0 might be closer to 2.5, and in subsequent tweets corrected the other points.
This is bad. As I’ve written before about climate change, when the news is alarming, the only responsible response is to be alarmed — and raise alarm. And like runaway climate change, the threat of a global pandemic, which graybeards have been warning about for years, is a reminder that we should always build public policy around the precautionary principle, rather than waiting until uncontestable and inarguable evidence arrives that action is necessary.
But there are more quotidian explanations for our indifference — indeed, these are probably the most powerful explanations. We are selfish, and don’t want to even entertain the possibility that what we take to be our “needs” could be threatened or taken away. As recently as a few weeks ago, even the most apocalyptic among us probably didn’t truly believe that devastation at such a scale was possible, that the little fortresses of our modern lives could be so assaulted by a distant virus.
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