If authorities keep ruling out holidays, people will stop listening
Current COVID outlook doesn’t promise a huge number of good times ahead
Psychologist Baruch Fischhoff is considered a giant in the field of risk communication and decision-making.
When asked for his quick analysis of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s somewhat un-prime-ministerial assessment this week that the COVID-19 pandemic “really sucks,” and that unless people are “really, really careful” usual holiday gatherings might be off the table, Fischhoff offered that, for people predisposed to the PM, “it probably speaks to their heart that he’s really worried and he’s willing to kind of let his professional guard down.”
Too often COVID risk communications have been chaotic, don’t recognize the diversity of situations people are in, and are too focused on rules, Fischoff said — “’thou shalt X’ without giving people
a mental model of why that is true.
“And the mental model that people need here is not all that complicated — it’s something about how much disease is out there, how is it transmitted in different kinds of settings, how well different practises protect you, how likely are you able to actually implement practises when you’re having a good time.”
The current COVID outlook doesn’t promise a huge number of good times ahead. “It’s going to be a tough winter,” Trudeau warned this week. “This winter will be difficult,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Thursday as that country prepares for a month-long partial shutdown beginning Monday. “The virus is circulating at a speed that not even the most pessimistic forecasts had anticipated,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised speech announcing a new national lockdown until Dec. 1.
In Canada, COVID-19 is resurging outside the fortress of the Atlantic Bubble and Northern Canada. In Manitoba, Premier Brian Pallister this week upbraided those Manitobans doing “dumb things” to “grow up.” The province’s chief public health officer said some of those testing positive have had “way too many contacts,” so many they can’t remember them all. And despite pleas to limit turkey dinners to “immediate households,” Thanksgiving weekend is being tied to rising case counts in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.
After months of wellmeaning but sometimes cloying slogans, about marathons, not sprints and how “we’re all in this together” — COVID, as the annual report this week from Canada’s chief public health officer highlighted, is in fact disproportionately harming and killing the marginalized, racialized communities and the elderly, not the privileged and powerful. A new Ipsos poll for Global News suggests Canadians are feeling sapped; half (48 per cent) said they’re tired of COVID public health recommendations and rules. While the majority (nine in 10) are following masking rules, parents (88 per cent) were less likely than those without kids (94 per cent) to say they’re doing everything they can — “perhaps an indictment of how workable many social distancing measures are in practice for those with young families,” the pollster said in a release.
Renowned epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm says a trifecta of risk issues — fatigue, anger and winter weather that will drive people indoors — is creating a perfect incubator for COVID-19. Add in the holidays, with travel and family get togethers, “and we’re going to see a major increase in transmission in family settings or social settings around the holidays,” predicted Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. Osterholm, by the way, in a Jan. 20 statement, warned that the coronavirus would cause a global pandemic.
Without vaccines, “We’re in this period where we don’t really have anything to offer people to limit transmission except their own behaviour at a time when that is a huge challenge to get the public to do it,” Osterholm said.