Lessons From The Crisis

Share this post
Things can get really bad, really fast, way faster than regular people will notice
lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com

Things can get really bad, really fast, way faster than regular people will notice

Lessons From The Crisis
Apr 27, 2021
10
Share this post
Things can get really bad, really fast, way faster than regular people will notice
lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com

Most people don’t pay that much attention to the news

Most people who do read news get their info from journalists focused on a narrow range of topics with a narrow range of approaches, reporting the views of a narrow range of experts who are not incentivised to be particularly accurate when making predictions on questions like “will this bad new disease come to your town and infect or kill people you care about”

Twitter avatar for @YearCovidCovid One Year Ago @YearCovid
5 Feb 2020 US Surgeon General: Americans should be more concerned about the flu than coronavirus
usatoday.com/story/news/hea…
Image

February 5th 2021

140 Retweets301 Likes

People also know that the media has a history of hyping up bad news which calibrated readers are used to discounting, and that’s assuming they read the alarming article about a foreign disease in the first place given that articles about foreigners get little attention.

Twitter avatar for @YearCovidCovid One Year Ago @YearCovid
29 Jan 2020 Total deaths: 133
Image

January 29th 2021

346 Retweets991 Likes

Even after all that, if you do finally see something that you can’t wish away or ignore, something which tells you that something bad really is coming, taking it seriously means looking silly if the crisis turns out not to be a big deal.

The cumulative effect of all this is that right before an impending crisis, life will look very normal and people will not be panicking.

37 days before the UK government threw the entire country into lockdown and barred people from going outside for anything other than a short list of permitted activities, people who stocked up their pantries were curiosity items

Twitter avatar for @YearCovidCovid One Year Ago @YearCovid
15 Feb 2020: 37 days to UK lockdown DOOMSDAY DAD "I’m so scared of Coronavirus I’ve spent hundreds on emergency food & water – and even made a DIY quarantine"
thesun.co.uk/news/10957371/…
Image

February 15th 2021

31 Retweets135 Likes

There were still breezy, innumerate articles laughing about the very idea of dying of covid, 8 weeks before a thousand British people per day would be suffocating to death.

Twitter avatar for @YearCovidCovid One Year Ago @YearCovid
15 Feb 2020: 37 days to UK lockdown "We all love a panic ... it provides people with an excuse to do our favourite things: stockpile, stress-queue, and invade other countries. But when it comes to the Wu flu, you're more likely to be killed by a cow."
mirror.co.uk/news/world-new…
Image
Image

February 15th 2021

54 Retweets107 Likes

Shops still looked normal, and politicians were still operating on “don’t panic people” mode, unaware that a bit of panic was probably needed. Part of this was possibly because many journalists in countries headed for serious problems wrongly assumed that their governments had a plan to stop the spread of the disease and wouldn’t find out for several weeks that this was not the case, but even so there seemed to be more concern about people being too worried than too little.

Twitter avatar for @YearCovidCovid One Year Ago @YearCovid
28 February 2020 Cass Sunstein: The Cognitive Bias That Makes Us Panic About Coronavirus "No one can specify the magnitude of the threat from the coronavirus. But one thing is clear: A lot of people are more scared than they have any reason to be."
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Image

February 28th 2021

301 Retweets844 Likes

Should we have expected this? Panic even at a moment of disaster is rare- think of all the people calmly walking home across bridges closed to car traffic on 9/11- but expert worries about panic were very common in the West as the virus took hold and spread. Looking unruffled is higher status than visible anxiety, and with journalism salaries dropping, status rewards are a big part of the attraction of a media career.

So next time disaster is looming, we probably will not see much evidence of it in the emotional reactions of regular people who will mostly not know anything is amiss, nor from members of the media who are professionally and personally incentivised to colour within the lines, regardless of their private worries. Even Kelsey Piper at Vox, one of the best writers on the pandemic and whose early warnings were very influential, experienced a lag between privately becoming concerned and publishing those worries.

Twitter avatar for @KelseyTuocKelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc
One thing I've struggled with personally - I told my family in early February that we should expect the virus to hit here and should buy what we'd need and plan to soon stop leaving our home. I wasn't that direct in a public article for three more weeks. Why not?

March 26th 2020

92 Retweets682 Likes

Lessons:

By the time people know something is up and have distinguished the signal from the ongoing background noise of hyped up threats, it’s likely only a very short while before real disaster strikes.

This feeling that the status quo must continue and panic must be avoided is likely to infect the government and media as much as anyone else, so the most important thing we can do “next time” is to raise the alarm, talk loudly about what we are doing to prepare, and make taking preventative action feel “normal” and acceptable. You never know who might be listening:

Twitter avatar for @Dominic2306Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306
@yashkaf And thanks for your Seeing Smoke blog, it, & ScottA on 2 march, helped me & some others in no10 realise we were going terribly wrong

March 20th 2021

23 Likes

Share this post
Things can get really bad, really fast, way faster than regular people will notice
lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com
Comments

Create your profile

0 subscriptions will be displayed on your profile (edit)

Skip for now

Only paid subscribers can comment on this post

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in

Check your email

For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.

Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.

TopNew

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2022 Lessons From The Crisis
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Publish on Substack Get the app
Substack is the home for great writing