The key lesson here: The word “pandemic” means an infectious disease has infected lots of people in lots of places. To be a pandemic, an outbreak has to be widespread and intense. It doesn’t have to be severe. 1918 was. 2009 wasn’t.
This coronavirus? The experts are pretty sure it’s going to go pandemic. They don’t know yet how severe it will be, though many are guessing it will be closer to 2009 than to 1918. Even a mild pandemic kills a lot of people, simply because a small percentage of a huge number is a lot of people. And a mild pandemic can certainly be disruptive: hospital overcrowding, absenteeism, supply chain problems, etc.
But if it’s mild and stays mild, it won’t be catastrophic.
Whether it’s mild or severe, a pandemic eventually makes containment efforts futile, and therefore a waste of effort. Patient isolation, contact tracing and monitoring, quarantines, and travel restrictions are the four main containment tools. The first two are conventional. The last two are controversial, not because they’re less effective than the first two but because they have bigger downsides.
None of the four, separately or together, can stop a pandemic. They can slow it a little, which isn’t nothing: It buys time for preparedness (emotional as well as medical and logistical). But as soon as the virus is spreading widely in a place, that place has no further use for containment.
The risk communication lesson now: Stop telling people that containment will “work.” If the coronavirus goes pandemic, as Tony Fauci and nearly every other expert expects it to, eventually (and probably pretty soon) it will be spreading widely in the U.S. too, and containment won’t make sense any more.
Copyright © 2020 by Peter M. Sandman
