In the early months of the pandemic – until about this time last year – the messaging coming from most experts and officials was excessively optimistic about the risk of COVID-19, telling people there was no reason to take precautions. When they realized their mistake, I think they overcompensated and became excessively pessimistic instead. The immediate result was a nearly national lockdown, even in places where the virus was barely circulating.
Now, a year later, many experts and officials are still excessively pessimistic in their messaging. It took them far too long to concede that maybe primary schools should be able to reopen without requiring precautions like six-foot social distancing that made completely in-person schooling unfeasible in much of the country. They’re still not conceding that fully vaccinated people should be able to eat inside restaurants and travel on planes.
In your email to me, you framed this as a conflict between “the science” and “people’s need to resume normal life.” I think it’s worse than that. Many experts are cherry-picking the scientific evidence in a way that seems to justify their pessimistic policy preferences. So it’s not science versus people’s need to resume normal life. It’s the excessive caution of many experts versus people’s need to resume normal life. Their excessive caution is much less grounded in “the science” than they would have us believe.
This has four outcomes, all of them bad:
- Some people bow to the experts’ opinions, especially in places where government officials are bowing to them and echoing them. So a major segment of the public is excessively cautious as well. These adherents to the mainstream advice may suffer the emotional and economic harm that excessive precaution-taking causes. They may hector less cautious neighbors and passersby, exacerbating pandemic polarization. At the extreme, they may have difficulty adjusting as the situation improves – leading in some cases, perhaps, to PTSD and agoraphobia.
- Other people try to bow to the experts’ opinions, and fail. The recommended precautions are simply too demanding in the face of their desperate need for a more normal life. Having failed to comply, they may feel like failures and keep trying. Or they may give up entirely and boomerang to the opposite extreme – taking too few precautions or none at all. Unlivable pandemic precautions are like a too-strict diet: When people can’t stick to the rules of the diet, they’re all too likely to binge. That’s why risk communication experts routinely advise offering a “Plan B” – a less demanding protocol for those who find the primary recommendations too tough.
- Still other people don’t even try to bow to the experts’ opinions. Instead, they listen to others (maybe dissenting experts; maybe non-experts; maybe online conspiracy theorists). They rightly suspect that the mainstream expert advice is overcautious. Since there’s no Plan B on offer, they go looking for one, or concoct their own – and what they come up with may be dangerous. Even worse, they may conclude that the mainstream experts are intentionally purveying overcautious advice for nefarious reasons (to suppress liberty, for example). At its worst, that could lead them to segue from merely rejecting specific COVID-19 advice to distrusting the experts themselves and everything the public health profession has to say, now and forever.
- Finally, some people try to figure out which of the experts’ opinions it makes sense to bow to. In particular, they have spent the year complying as best they can with recommended precautions: wearing masks, staying six feet away from others, avoiding indoor events and crowds, canceling travel plans. All along, they have assumed that vaccines, if and when they became available, would replace this menu of burdensome non-pharmaceutical interventions with a much less burdensome pharmaceutical one: a shot, or maybe a couple of shots. Now they’re told that after they’re vaccinated they should nonetheless keep taking most of the precautions they’ve been taking for a year already. That doesn’t just feel like a betrayal. It feels like an exercise in futility. Instead of replacing the earlier precautions, vaccination gets tacked on top. “The hell with that!” some people, especially young people, are likely to conclude. The pessimism of mainstream experts may thus be undermining COVID-19 vaccine uptake.
If we assume that the COVID-19 situation in the U.S. will keep improving, then it’s pretty obvious why excessively pessimistic, excessively cautious expert advice is harmful. But what if the situation in the U.S. worsens again? – as it very well might, in response to one of the virus variants or something else.
Even then, I think, the experts’ over-caution will have done harm. Last spring’s premature lockdowns in places without much COVID-19 made it harder, not easier, for people to accept and endure later lockdown-like precautions when COVID-19 started spreading locally.
It is neither good science nor good risk communication to urge people to take precautions now because they were needed earlier and might be needed again later.
By all means forewarn people that things may get bad again. We may see variants that are deadlier and/or more transmissible than the ones we’ve experienced so far. Even those of us who are vaccinated may learn that our immunity is waning, or is insufficient against newly circulating variants, or doesn’t protect us from getting infected and infecting our neighbors. We may need booster shots. We may need masks and social distancing too, on and off – depending on what’s circulating locally, how much of it is circulating locally, and how well our immunity is holding. We don’t know how long it will take for the pandemic to be truly over. We don’t know how many twists and turns we’ll encounter on the road ahead.
That’s pessimistic enough! It is a reason to enjoy what respite we have – not a reason to take undue precautions now because we needed them a few months ago and may need them again a few months hence.
Copyright © 2021 by Peter M. Sandman
