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Americans have become polarised over something other than politics. We’re now divided into those who are washing our hands more carefully and more often, but otherwise living as usual, and those who are buying a year’s supply of toilet paper at Costco and, at the extreme end, ordering $400 bottles of now-rare Purell.
For every Covid-19 headline urging “don’t panic,†there’s another saying this epidemic is “unstoppable†or “out of control†and that we are “unprepared.†Uncertainty is still high enough that facts can be used to support either argument.
People just want clear, simple numbers on the likely spread of Covid-19, when it’s likely to peak, and the odds that it will be fatal. But there’s no consensus.
An interview in Vox with WHO assistant director general Bruce Aylward says the number of cases may be lower than thought but death rates could turn out to be, as suspected, over 1%. This is based on extensive investigations of the situation in China.
A story in Slate recently by Harvard doctor Jeremy Samuel Faust, headlined “Covid-19 isn’t as deadly as we think,†uses data from the ill-fated cruise ship Diamond Princess to make the opposite case — arguing that once we get a handle on the extent of mild cases, doctors may find the death rate much lower than 1%.
What we do know is that some people are in more real danger — people over 80, people with compromised immune systems and those with certain pre-existing respiratory conditions are at a much higher risk of death.
As for the rest of us, there’s less risk but plenty of guilt. We don’t want to spread the disease by doing the wrong thing.
New information is coming in all the time. A paper published in Science examines the effect of travel bans and suggests they had only a small effect on slowing the spread of the virus out of China. The researcher suggest that going forward, the more important action will be to educate people about hand washing and avoiding big public gatherings. And people should prepare to stay home for two weeks if identified as likely to be exposed — which shouldn’t require that much toilet paper.
This divide between the scared and not-scared is forming natural filter bubbles. If you’re going about your normal business, you probably see there are still plenty of avocados in the supermarket. People are still going to their anti-gravity yoga classes and taking off on weekend adventures. Most people on the street are not wearing masks.
—Bloomberg
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She has written for the Economist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Psychology Today, Science and other publications. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology