People take serious risks for any
number of reasons. On the battlefield,
heroes often sacrifice their lives for their fellow soldiers and sailors. Where
a cause is just and a point needs to be made, stepping into harm’s way might be
a moral requirement. Think of the civil rights workers and protesters who lost
their lives fighting for voting rights and to end segregation in the 1960s.
Think of the protesters in 2020, marching against tear gas, pepper spray, rubber
bullets and other dangerous projectiles, batons, the threat of arrest and being
jailed, and the obvious risks of crowd-transmitted coronavirus to let the world
know that we must, finally, end racial injustice and change basic police
tactics based on military training, uniforms and equipment (the proclivity to
use violence as a first and not a last resort).
Each one of those heroes made a
conscious choice to take a personal risk for what they believed to be a higher
cause. In today’s environment, there is the secondary risk of becoming a
carrier of COVID-19 and thus a potential super-spreader. Risks. But where the stakes are lower, where
flaunting social distancing and wearing a mask in public, or applying safe
practices to businesses as they open are merely inconvenient, where is the
justification? What do most Americans believe?
The numbers are beginning to tell us
that while there are places in the US where the coronavirus infection rates are
subsiding, as of June 17th, there are 21 states where those rates
are rising, and in some cases, exploding. The June 11th near-7%
plunge of stock prices on Wall Street, prompted by a bad news presentation from
the Federal Reserve on the impact of the pandemic, was a reminder to all of us
that worst might not in fact be over… that what we may be experiencing is the
beginning of a second and more devastating wave of pandemic infections and
deaths.
Indeed, even in “more safety
conscious than average America” Southern California, Orange County has changed
the mandatory-masks-in-public rule to “strongly advised.” So, lots of folks are
strolling, shopping (some businesses still require masks) and playing without
social distancing or masks.
Every state of the union is, to one
degree or another, relaxing rules to reopen business activities. And as noted
in my June 13th Are We Just Going to Learn to Live with Massive Death Tolls? blog, electing to reopen
the economy before there is a cure or a widely deployed effective vaccine is a
decision to pursue herd immunity. And that course of action requires that at
least 60% of the population be exposed to the virus – currently even New York
City is at about 20% – which often takes over a year and two or three waves.
What that degree of exposure would wreak in terms of death and destruction is
not pretty.
We still do not have sufficient
accurate testing to monitor the spread/containment of COVID-19, and thus we are
particularly dependent on people voluntarily practicing social distancing and using
face masks/hand sanitizer. And since this massive and probably irreversible
trend towards reopening the economy is upon us, it becomes relevant to
determine how willing Americans are to adhere to safe practices and how
seriously they treat the pandemic. ICF, a global consultancy firm that has been
around for half a century, often applies detailed surveys and trend analyses to
fashion advice for their clients. Three senior ICF executives – Thomas Brassell, James
Dayton and John Boyle – summarized
their COVID-19 American attitude findings in the June 12th
FastCompany.com. Here are some salient excerpts from that article:
“According to our data from March,
Americans were listening to, and placing a great deal more trust in, public
health experts (87%) compared to state and local government (78%), federal
government (63%), and news media (46%). This remained consistent in April.
Further, Americans’ trust in the CDC was high in March (86%), dipping only
slightly in April (82%)…
“According to findings recorded at
the end of March, nearly 4 in 5 Americans (79%) reported that public health
benefits are more important than economic costs. Interestingly, Americans who
reported losing their jobs (permanently and temporarily) were even more likely
to state that public health benefits are more important than economic costs.
“Public support for government
mitigation measures was high in March as well. A majority of Americans felt it
was very important to prohibit gatherings of 10 or more people (63%), stay
three to six feet away from others (78%), and self-quarantine if exposed to
COVID-19 (88%). This remained consistent in April…
“According to findings recorded at the
end of March, nearly 4 in 5 Americans (79%) reported that public health
benefits are more important than economic costs. Interestingly, Americans who
reported losing their jobs (permanently and temporarily) were even more likely
to state that public health benefits are more important than economic costs.
“Public support for government
mitigation measures was high in March as well. A majority of Americans felt it
was very important to prohibit gatherings of 10 or more people (63%), stay
three to six feet away from others (78%), and self-quarantine if exposed to
COVID-19 (88%). This remained consistent in April…
“A recent survey led by researchers from Harvard Kennedy School, Northeastern University, and Rutgers University supports this trend as well. The study found a majority of people in the U.S. want to continue physical distancing measures, even as the federal government and some state governors are pushing to reopen the economy.
“At
the end of March, most Americans (81%) believed that the worst of the COVID-19
pandemic was yet to come—and, according to public health experts, they were
right… By mid-April, while the majority of respondents still believed that the
worst was yet to come with the coronavirus (63%), the proportion who thought
the worst was
behind us increased from 12% in late March to 31%.”
We’ve been here before, as the above
photo from the 1918-20 Spanish Flu pandemic illustrates (675,000 Americans
died). And as the above numbers illustrate, we actually know better… but we
just can’t seem to bring ourselves to do what we need to do to minimize the
harm from a disease with the sole mandate of replicating and infecting as many
bodies as it can. We’ll take those risks… hoping it won’t be us. Until it is.
I’m
Peter Dekom, and common sense, a need to earn a living and some good
old-fashioned denial make for exceptionally strange and incompatible bedfellows.
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