Read on Twitter
I’ve had maybe a eight or nine conversations in the past two weeks, mostly off Twitter, about the idea that Americans don’t feel/absorb the reality of mass covid deaths. I’m wary of making assumptions about how people feel, but also interested in mechanisms.
Last year, HHS loosened many patient privacy restrictions, allowing doctors to, for example, discuss patient care over unsecured email. But they cracked down hard on photography of hospitalized covid patients. https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospitals/
We also never got the widespread PSA coverage that some countries have used—because the executive branch chose to squash and distort coverage of the pandemic. Instead, we’ve had a highly filtered Fauci, some governors and mayors, and a lot of numbers.
I think a lot about covid numbers and what they can and can’t do. I can tell you that every time we release them we are swarmed with people determined to discredit them as lies no matter what they show. As a comms tool, data is really vulnerable to misinformation.
This HCI paper is a preprint, but extremely interesting on the intentional distortion of public data to reach “unorthodox” (in this case, incorrect) conclusions about the pandemic https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07993
But also raw numbers, even well visualized, are not going to reach everyone, and without widespread photo and video coverage to show how horrific the virus can be, we’re left with a lot of TV opining and a lot of text.
But also: Millions of Americans have been sick or seen family members get very sick or die. Black people are far more likely than white people to have lost close friends or family. Indigenous and Latinx people in many parts of the US have seen huge, disproportionate losses.
Millions of other Americans experience covid numbers as a threat that is necessarily diminished by the immediate fact that they can’t feed their kids or pay rent, or are seeing hard-won stability entirely dissolve.
So when we say “we” I would also like us to say who we mean.
So when we say “we” I would also like us to say who we mean.
