Talking to Frightened (or Miserable) People about COVID-19

Validate our fear.

Whatever you do, don’t tell people not to be afraid. The pandemic fear of your frightened public is appropriate and useful; it’s what keeps them social-distancing. And the only way to seduce people in denial back to a level of fear they can tolerate is to validate that it’s okay to be frightened. Telling people in denial not to be afraid is telling them to stay in denial!

Almost as bad as dissing the public’s fear is minimizing it. Don’t call it concern, fear’s wimpy cousin.

Validating fear isn’t something you can do abstractly, with words like “I know how you feel” or “I understand that people are frightened.” Make it concrete. Tell people stories about themselves, about how frightening it is not to know whether you or your loved ones will get infected, not to know how bad things will get at the local hospital, not to know if you’ll keep your job or your home, not to know how long before it’s over, not to know what life will be like after it’s over.

And spare a few words for misery. After 9/11, surprisingly few Americans (even New Yorkers) were frightened that they, too, would be victims of a terrorist attack. Far more were saddened – even depressed – at the prospect of living in a world where terrorist attacks happen regularly. I think COVID-19 is more frightening than 9/11 was. But it’s at least as misery-making as well.

Express your own fear.

It is very difficult for fearless leaders to help a frightened public or a public in denial bear their fear. Part of the emotional guidance we need is role models of leaders bearing their own fear.

Faking fearlessness is even worse. I have long believed that officials so often misdiagnose the public as panicking because the officials themselves are feeling panicky. In an effort to deny those panicky feelings, the officials project them onto the public. The most effective leaders acknowledge their fears and let them show. Obviously, the goal isn’t to give the impression that you can’t cope. It’s exactly the opposite: to demonstrate that you can bear your fears, and so can the public.

The same goes for misery. I know much has changed for Rudy Giuliani since he was New York City’s mayor during 9/11. But nothing can take away his superb moment of crisis leadership, only hours after the Twin Towers fell. Asked to estimate how many had died, he replied, “More than any of us can bear” – bearing it, feeling it, not denying it, and not crumpling under the burden. A mayor who couldn’t bear it would not have been able to lead us. But a mayor who found it easy to bear, who seemed not to feel the misery, would not have been able to lead us either.

Be candid about how bad things are.

This is probably the most common crisis communication mistake officials make: over-reassuring messages that sugarcoat the bad news. The goal of sugarcoating is sometimes self-serving (to avoid criticism for the precautions you didn’t take early enough, for example). But often the goal is virtuous: to keep people calm. And the more awful the objective situation, the more tempting it is for officials to over-reassure.

It doesn’t work. Worse, it backfires. Over-reassuring messaging makes frightened people feel abandoned, alone with their fear. It pushes people in denial more deeply into denial. Both groups smell a rat, even if they don’t know exactly what frightening facts you’re leaving out or papering over.

Among its other harms, over-reassurance undermines officials’ credibility, and thus their ability to lead. Since it’s impossible to guess just right about how severe a crisis is going to be, the crisis communication rule of thumb is to make sure your messaging (especially your early messaging) errs on the alarming side. Your credibility survives handily if you have to come back later and say, “It’s not as bad as we feared.” It takes a hit if you have to come back and say, “It’s worse than we thought.” If you have to admit “worse than we thought” twice, your credibility is gone.

Candor about bad news can be paradoxically calming. We all suspected the pandemic was getting worse. Telling us precisely how much worse leaves us feeling not just well-informed, but well-led. It’s bracing. It’s the other shoe dropping. And typically the bad news isn’t as bad as our worst fears.

“Candid” doesn’t mean unnecessarily terrifying, though. Hotly emotional, dramatic fear appeals are the right strategy for getting through to genuinely apathetic people … if there are any left. For frightened people and those in denial, somewhere between gentle and matter-of-fact is the right tone: scary content presented without scary theatrics. Though he started out over-reassuring, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has set an excellent example in recent weeks.

Provide any genuine reassurance you can find.

While over-reassurance and false reassurance backfire badly, genuine reassurance adds enormous value. It helps keep frightened people calm. It helps lure people in denial out of their denial. We could all use some good news right now!

Here’s a crisis communication “trick” for giving people reassuring information without coming across as over-reassuring: Put the reassuring information in the subordinate clause, leaving the main clause sounding more like a warning than a reassurance. “Even though the number of new confirmed cases went down yesterday, I don’t want to put too much faith in one day’s good news.” If you do it right, you leave your public feeling more reassured than you sounded; you leave them thinking you’re a bit of an alarmist.

But let me say again: Only genuine reassurance is useful. Over-reassurance and false reassurance backfire. At least for now, officials have no business predicting that the pandemic will be over any time soon, or that an effective vaccine or treatment is right around the corner, or even that the peak is imminent. They have no business pretending that the end of the current lockdown, when it happens, will be the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even baby steps toward normal (or toward the New Normal) need to be framed without excessive optimism. Some leaders can manage to stay credible while expressing faith that there will be light at the end of the tunnel, while others shouldn’t try. No one should claim to see that light just yet.

The most readily available reassurance is evidence of communities coming together, of resilience and initiative and determination reasserting themselves, of the manifold ways people and organizations are pitching in. While I was working on these responses, I read journalist Tunku Varadarajan’s ode to the garbagemen of New York City during the pandemic. It was heartening, tender, and bracing, all at once. It reassured me about the beautiful sweetness that people are capable of even at the worst of times.

Give people things to do.

Virtually all pandemic response experts agree that in the absence of a vaccine, a cure, or even a treatment, “non-pharmaceutical interventions” are the only way to fight the virus. The two big non-pharmaceutical interventions are hygiene and social distancing. Obviously, both require action on the individual level. The government can’t wash your hands, or decide for you not to go over to a friend’s house, or remind you to call an elderly neighbor who’s home alone.

In a month or two we should know more about whether people who have been infected and recovered are immune (at least for a while). If they are, the opportunities for volunteerism are amazing. It’s not too soon to start talking about that, even organizing for it.

But even in a crisis where the principal management strategies are tasks only government can do, a wise government finds tasks to ask the public to do. As psychiatrists and generals have long known, action binds anxiety. People who are doing things to protect themselves and others can bear their fear better and are less likely to flip into denial. They can bear their misery better too, and are less likely to sink into depression or hopelessness.

Action also teaches lessons. People who are doing things seek out information to make sense of what they are doing. They teach themselves that the danger is real (otherwise action would be unnecessary) and that it is manageable (otherwise action would be futile). This is exactly what we want them to learn.

It is always a mistake to treat the public as mere audience – and never more so than in an emergency. People want to take action, not just to protect themselves and their loved ones, but also to pitch in on behalf of the whole community. In decades of reviewing pandemic plans and tabletop exercises, that was one of the things I always watched for: an active role for the public.

Give people choices of things to do.

Giving people a menu of actions to choose from recruits not just their ability to act, but also their ability to decide. It is therefore even more effective in helping people bear their fear and misery. The chance to choose ways to protect ourselves and ways to help our neighbors gives us a much-needed sense of control in this out-of-control time.

The ideal menu of choices brackets the precautions you want people to take with others that are more protective and less protective. X is the minimum precaution you consider acceptable. Y is your recommended precaution. Z is an additional precaution for people who feel especially vulnerable or determined. Surrounding your Y with an X and a Z yields more compliance with Y. And it defines those who prefer X or Z as still part of the plan, not rebels.

A lot of governments are prescribing social distancing rules in elaborate detail. Pretty much everything that isn’t required is forbidden. Maybe that’s the way it’s got to be. But if I were sitting with the experts, I’d advise making some room for individual choice – specifying an X and a Z as well as a Y.

And what about precautions people want to take that you don’t want them to take? If many people are settling on some action of their own that helps them feel safer or less miserable, I would urge officials to think twice before criticizing their choice. Unless it is really dangerous, they would be wiser to tolerate it.

From the outset of the pandemic, I hated the deceitfulness of most official rhetoric about masks, for example. The only good reason to urge people not to wear surgical masks was the shortage, and the importance of prioritizing healthcare workers’ needs over anyone else’s. There was never a good reason to urge people not to wear bandanas, scarves, or cloth face coverings of various sorts. Telling people they had no need for a mask and were idiots to want to wear one was dishonest, condescending, and skepticism-inducing. So was telling them, with no data, that wearing a mask would give them a false sense of security (a claim that officials never make about handwashing).

Explain what the government is doing too.

This is too obvious to belabor. As part of their effort to figure out what to do, expect, and feel, people want to know what the government is doing about the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are at least five categories of things the government should be doing, and talking about doing:

• Government action to reduce my chances of getting infected – social distancing regulations, for example.
• Government action to improve my chances of getting well if I’m infected – buying more ventilators, for example.
• Government action to manage the short-term damage of the pandemic – aid to jobless individuals and endangered businesses, for example.
• Government action to speed the transition from things getting worse to things getting better – building test capacity, for example.
• Government action to restart the economy and nurture the New Normal – I don’t have an example; we’re not up to that yet.

Explaining what the government is doing is last on my list not because it’s unimportant but because there is zero risk that government officials will neglect it. Officials are right to tell the public what the government is doing. But they are sadly mistaken if they think that’s all the public needs to hear.