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- What has impressed me about the coronavirus is the extent to which its fearsome reputation has eclipsed and occasionally exceeded its actual effects. This is not to deny that some of these effects have been, in places, quite terrible. It is only to point out that the myth of the pandemic — the story that already clothed it upon arrival — has sometimes had more influence on policy than the facts of the matter, which are more difficult to ascertain.
- One of the interesting features in all of this was the role the word “science” played. I have yet to hear a statement by either Justin Trudeau or Doug Ford, the two main political figures for a citizen of Ontario like myself, that fails to emphasize that they are “following science” or, often enough, “the best science,” as if others might be following the inferior kind. Yet when this began, there was little science — good, bad, or indifferent — to actually follow. In place of controlled, comparative studies, we had informed guesswork. No one had seen this virus before, and certainly no scientist had ever studied a situation in which an entire healthy population, minus its essential workers, was quarantined to try to “flatten the curve” or to “protect our health care system.” Such a policy had never been tried.
- Rather than admitting to the judgments they have made, politicians shelter behind the skirts of science. This allows them to appear valiant — they are fearlessly following science — while at the same time absolving them of responsibility for the choices they have actually made or failed to make.
- The decisions made at the beginning of this pandemic will have consequences that reverberate far into the future. These will include unprecedented debt, deaths from diseases that have gone undiagnosed and untreated during the COVID‑19 mobilization, lost jobs, stalled careers and educations, failed businesses, and the innumerable unknown troubles that have occurred behind the closed doors of the lockdown. Whether these harms outweigh the benefits of flattening the curve is a moral question, not a scientific one. It would remain a moral question even if the Imperial College wizards had had an infallible crystal ball and could have given us an accurate forecast.
- A great part of the panic this past spring was about saving our health care system and not putting overwhelmed doctors into the position where they would have to decide who lived and who died in hospital wards. But did we not quietly make equivalent decisions about others, all the while hiding the fact that we were making them? If someone loses a business, in which they have invested everything, and then their life falls apart, have they not been sacrificed or triaged, just as surely as the old person who we feared might not get a ventilator? Moral decisions are difficult, but they should at least be faced as moral decisions.
- My point is not that a particular model is right or wrong. The variety of plausible scenarios indicates that we are in a condition of ignorance and uncertainty — a condition that should not be hidden by the pretense that science is lighting the way. Nevertheless, such models, as in the case of Bhattacharya and Packalen’s work, can remind us that in saving some, we may have abandoned many others, and that the ones saved will often be those who are already in the best position to protect themselves, while the abandoned will often be the weakest or most vulnerable. Put another way: political deliberation may have stopped — transfixed by the threat of the virus — exactly where it should have started.
- Risk consciousness has run on a parallel track. The idea itself is old — traders began sharing the risks of dangerous ventures millennia ago — but it has become more pervasive and more mathematical in our time. Expecting parents, long before they ever meet their child, know the probability of various conditions for which he or she may be at risk. People are regularly checked for diseases they don’t yet have, because they are at risk of getting them. We are, as the health researcher Alan Cassels once joked, pre-diseased. This fosters what might be called a hypothetical cast of thought: a habit of living in the future or acting in advance. It also accustoms people to thinking of themselves in statistical terms rather than as unique individuals. Risks pertain not to individuals but to a population, a hypothetical entity composed of statistical figments that resemble each other in some way. “My risk,” in other words, does not pertain to me personally — I remain terra incognita — but rather to my statistical doppelgänger. When awareness of risk, in this sense, reaches a certain intensity, a habit of thought forms. People are primed for impending risks. It makes sense when we are told that we have to act now, before we know anything for sure, because, if we wait, it will surely be too late.
- Risk has another aspect that is relevant to the present moment. In 1986, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck described a “risk society” — a social formation that amounts to an ongoing science experiment with risks we can neither assess nor control. We have no other Earth on which we can conduct a nuclear war and observe the consequences; no spare atmosphere that we can heat up experimentally to see how things turn out. This is a terrifying situation, and it has the consequence of making us extremely risk averse. At the mercy of towering risks that we can barely comprehend, we become all the more zealous in attempting to contain more manageable ones. At least we can try to “wrestle the virus to the ground,” as multiple politicians and editorial boards have put it this year.
- This bred another habit of thought: problems must be proactively managed, never simply avoided or endured.
- The second is the sentimentality that has become pervasive in our social and political affairs. By sentimentality, I mean a tendency to pretty things up, to speak and act as if we all felt an almost saintly ardour for the common weal, and to continually dramatize feelings we do not actually have — for example, the “thoughts and prayers” that are transmitted day and night over our airwaves. This tendency has made it easy to turn the pandemic into a morality play, with heroic front-line workers risking their lives to keep the housebound safe from harm. I do not mean to disparage the real dangers some have faced, only to point to the habit of exaggeration that endows everyone who ventures out in public to do a job with an aura of sanctity. The unctuous, honeyed tones in which the prime minister has addressed the country have been particularly egregious, but many agencies have participated in this agony of solicitude. Hospitals, for example, regularly praise their “champions” who “stop at nothing” in their exercise of “relentless care.” These effusions are a kind of blackmail that sets policy beyond the reach of careful thought by investing it with unimpeachable feeling.