SATURDAy, MARCH 14 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
The coronavirus outbreak
uncertainty is the idea that time
both heals and provides false
comfort. over time, with good
guidance, most people will figure
out how best to cope and to help
others get through this period.
But over time, as even the most
dire and dark news gets absorbed
into people’s daily lives, “there’s a
saturation effect when there’s j ust
too much information and people
just tune out,” Ballagh said. “over
time, concern drops, and that can
be dangerous, too.”
[email protected]life.
To send your child to school,
you must accept that others will
protect your baby as you would,
even when you are anxiously
aware that no one else has the
same absolute devotion to that
child as a parent does.
To continue with daily life in
the face of a deadly pandemic, you
must accept a certain degree of
risk or else you cannot obtain
food and care for your family.
one of many paradoxes the
world faces in a time of dangerousernment won’t be there for you,
taking that idea beyond the prep-
per w orld into the general popula-
tion.”
The line between healthy adap-
tation to an emergency and coun-
terproductive panic has much to
do with two of the most powerful
forces in any human existence:
denial and survival. often, psy-
chologists say, the two instincts
work hand in hand to steer people
away from danger. People need a
strong sense of denial to cope
with the risks involved in dailyexercise is playing out in real
time,” Toner said. “In retrospect,
we probably would not have in-
cluded that number. But we did
because it was important to the
exercise to get people in the right
frame of mind, that this kind of
event is on an unprecedented
scale.”
To ner does not expect 65 mil-
lion people to die — the scenario
purposely used a huge number to
drive home the gravity of a pan-
demic — but he does worry that
healthy concern could spiral into
panic if authorities do not “forth-
rightly tell people things they
don’t want to hear.”
“Panic is bad, but some degree
of anxiety is good and adaptive,”
he said. “It’s normal to be anxious
if that drives people to do con-
structive things. The vast majori-
ty of people who get this illness
will be just fine. But that small
percentage who do poorly is a big
number, and it’s good for people
to understand that while this may
not be a risk to me personally, it is
to the society in which I live.”
The fear that productive and
healthy concern might devolve
into outright panic is leading
many public health officials to
focus on getting politicians to un-
derstand a crucial point — that
nothing matters more than giving
the public constant trustworthy
and f rank i nformation. one factor
that determines how such data is
received is people’s state of mind
about the messengers who deliver
the news and set policies.
The prospect of a widespread
loss of confidence in the govern-
ment’s ability to handle the epi-
demic is magnified by the recent
breakdown in trust in the news
media, said Amy Ballagh, a vice
president at Georgia Southern
University whose research fo-
cused on how news coverage of
epidemics alters public behavior.
“Every time there’s a death, it’s
in the news — a countdown of
deaths that is causing terror,” she
said. “A nd it’s worse with this
epidemic because you have peo-
ple in leadership saying things
that make people distrust author-
ity — things about the ‘deep state’
and ‘fake news’ and statements
that undermine science. When
people decide they really can’t
trust anyone, that’s when they
take things into their own hands.
That’s when you see panic buy-
ing.”
The result is runs on face
masks even though scientists
urge that the supply be reserved
for health workers, or people
stockpiling hand sanitizer, antibi-
otics and grocery staples. “People
in my community are doing this,
and it causes disruption in the
supply chain,” Ballagh said. “A nd
that creates the thing we fear the
most — lack of confidence.”
rice said that the best way to
avert panic w ould be for the c oun-
try’s leaders to present “a clear,
consistent, accurate message that
is unified.”
“Instead,” he said, “we have the
president saying one thing and
people in the administration say-
ing another. That feeds into this
widespread d istrust of t he govern-
ment that’s been around at least
since Hurricane Katrina, which
spread this notion that the gov-most people, Trump told the na-
tion.
“Things will get worse than
they are,” fauci told Congress.
The Internet has created the
impression among many people
that anyone can be an expert on
anything, Briscoe said. Add in the
open sewer of mis- and disinfor-
mation on social media and it is
more difficult than ever for gov-
ernments and scientists to expect
that the public will accept and
follow official advice and direc-
tion.
But it is still possible for gov-
ernments, scientists and other
experts to avert panic and bring
people together, Briscoe said.
“In Britain, the politicians have
stepped back and put forward its
chief medical and science officers
as the public face, and we have
daily updates from these experts
that have really provided an an-
chor,” he said.
Similarly, this week, the Dis-
trict of Columbia’s government
sought to remind city residents
that they live in a society with
rules and expectations. The gov-
ernment sent out missives spell-
ing out the right to paid sick leave,
offered official assistance in
cracking down on price gouging
and spelled out ways to protect
against scammers taking advan-
tage of fear.
But information can inflame
just as easily as it can calm. When
scientists and public health ex-
perts at Johns Hopkins Universi-
ty gathered in october to game
out what might happen in a pan-
demic, they did not know how
prescient their exercise would be:
They played out a scenario in
which a coronavirus spread from
China to the rest of the world.
The exercise, called Event 201,
imparted important lessons, said
Eric To ner, a Hopkins internist
and emergency physician at the
university’s Center for Health Se-
curity, but those lessons — more
international cooperation, better
funding for intensive care and
other medical facilities — applied
more to long-term policy initia-
tives than to the immediate crisis.
The bottom line of that octo-
ber exercise is creating more anxi-
ety than anyone anticipated: The
group concluded that 65 million
people would die under their fic-
tional scenario.
“The story line that drove ourparts of the country clear out
shelves at grocery stores and oth-
er retail outlets. But there has
been no degradation of law and
order, no sign of social unrest.
The line dividing a cautious
and responsible reaction from a
panicked, entirely self-protective
and competitive response can be
thin and not entirely rational,
according to those who study how
people behave in the face of con-
tagious, fatal illnesses.
It doesn’t take zombies to trig-
ger unhelpful public hysteria,
said Jerry rice, a social science
teacher in Georgia whose doctor-
al research looked at what drives
fears of disasters, why some peo-
ple become obsessive preppers
and why people either panic or
remain calm.
“What people fear the most is
what they can’t control and
what’s new,” rice said. “A pan-
demic like this is both of those
things. We haven’t experienced
anything like this since the 1918
flu. In contrast, people aren’t as
afraid of car travel, because we
know it so well, even though car
travel kills far more people.”
The wall-to-wall news coverage
and social media chatter about
the crisis can provoke anxiety as
much as it informs and allays fear.
“right now, panic is running
neck and neck with cynicism, and
cynicism is winning,” said long-
time radio host Chip franklin,
referring to people who have
called in to his show on KGo in
San francisco. “Talk radio is es-
sentially people 45 and older —
they’ve lived through 9/11 and
they’ve lived through the ’
crash. They’re worried about
their jobs, worried about the mar-
ket shutting down. We hear a lot
of people’s fears, but they’re not
panicking, because they really be-
lieve we’re going to get through
this.”
fear by itself doesn’t n ecessari-
ly lead to panic. fear can bring
out the best in people.
“A s ociety u nited in fear is more
cohesive,” said Simon Briscoe, a
British statistician who wrote a
book, “Panicology,” on when and
why people panic. “one where
people fear different things is
liable to fragment.”
When Briscoe wrote his book
on panic and pandemics a decade
ago, dire warnings about swine
flu, bird flu, meteors and geneti-
cally modified foods seemed to be
part of a pattern of fizzles that left
experts sputtering after projec-
tions of doom fell short. Briscoe
argued that the modern era had
produced a tendency toward pan-
ic that was neither healthy nor
sustainable.
“It was quite easy to be dismis-
sive then,” he said this week. Now
that a real pandemic has devel-
oped, he said, it has become clear
that the key to preventing panic is
good, dependable information.
Appeals to people’s goodness
can help, historians say, but it
matters who is making the appeal
and how their leadership com-
ports with their words.
“We’re in this together, to do
the right things with calm and
protect the citizens of the world,”
said Te dros Adhanom Ghebreye-
sus, director general of the World
Health organization. “It’s do-
able.”
Panic tends to bubble up when
messages from politicians clash
with their actions, or when gov-
ernments send mixed messages.
In h is oval office address to the
nation Wednesday night, Presi-
dent Trump reversed himself on
several counts, telling Americans,
for example, to stay home if they
become ill rather than to push
through as if they had a cold. But
the president’s message re-
mained rhetorically distant from
the blunter, harsher account com-
ing from the government’s top
scientific voice on the virus issue,
Anthony S. fauci, head of the
National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases.
“The risk is very, very low” for
pAnIc from A
No zombies. No riots. But it’s evident that people are rattled.
JOHN TAGGART FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
police vehicles at a gas station in new Rochelle, n.Y., on Tuesday. Gov. Andrew M. cuomo (D) this week mandated a one-mile containment zone in new Rochelle, the
epicenter of new York state’s coronavirus outbreak. As world governments take unprecedented steps to curtail the coronavirus, public calm has thus far prevailed.MASON TRINCA FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTA man visits a family member behind a windowpane Friday at Life
care center, the hard-hit senior living center in Kirkland, Wash.
WindowNation.comBuynow