Facts and Honesty

The advice offered by Aaron E. Carroll in his New York Times op-ed on the trade-offs in managing the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic strikes me as pretty sensible:

Too many view protective measures as all or nothing: Either we do everything, or we might as well do none. That’s wrong. Instead, we need to see that all our behavior adds up.

Each decision we make to reduce risk helps. Each time we wear a mask, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we socialize outside instead of inside, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we stay six feet away instead of sitting closer together, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we wash our hands, eat apart and don’t spend time in large gatherings of people, we’re adding to the pile.

If the pile gets big enough, we as a society can keep this thing in check.

But rather than focus on the cumulative benefits of individual actions, our attention too often rests on the few who refuse to act safely. We rage online over a couple of people who throw a fit about wearing a mask in a store. We spend far less time being grateful that so many Americans do wear one.

We don’t need everyone to wear a mask. We need more people to wear masks. We need to be willing to wear a mask even if others refuse, because every little bit matters.

This kind of thinking holds true even for vaccines, which add a huge amount to the pile. We won’t need everyone to get one to reach herd immunity. We just need enough people to do so.

To keep the pile big enough, though, we need to be willing to trade some activities for others. If people want to play on a sports team, for instance, they should consider giving something up to do so. Increasing their risk by participating in a group activity should prompt them to reduce their risk the rest of the time.

But we aren’t very good at discussing trade-offs. We want it all. We want to eat in restaurants, crowd into houses, go to work and celebrate occasions en masse.

We could choose to engage in just some of those things. We could decide to get a massage or get our nails done or have a haircut — instead of demanding that all of these and more be available to us simultaneously.

From a policy perspective, we’ve been just as unwilling to sacrifice. Almost everyone thinks that opening schools is extremely important (myself included). But too few people have been willing to discuss what we might be willing to shut down to make that happen.

Two factors that would help in managing those trade-offs would be facts and honesty. From a quantitative standpoint how much does wearing facemasks in closed indoor spaces reduce the transmission of the disease? How much in the out-of-doors? How much does six feet of social distancing reduce the transmission of the disease? How about three feet?

Whether the answers are 30% or 3% makes a difference. It marks the difference between measures which are meaningful cumulatively and those that are if not meaningless mostly symbolic. Unfortunately, we simply don’t know the answers to those and thousands of other questions. That’s where honesty comes in.

Also unfortunately neither trade-offs, quantitative decision-making, nor honesty are the strong suits of elected officials. I think it would facilitate addressing the spread of the diseases if elected officials were frank about their objectives including acknowledging when they’ve made mistakes. People could assess whether the means being used were successful or not. Don’t expect people to trust the judgments of elected officials forever.