Who wants to listen to news anchors spout off a bunch of percentages and rates of change without any context? No one. No one wants that.
Communication about numbers has been a struggle during this crisis, and it has not exactly gotten better over time. If there are any cardinal rules in communicating during a crisis that help defer panic, they are “be direct,” “keep it simple,” and “be consistent.”
Simply by turning on the news or browsing social media, we can see that that simple, direct approach has not been the case for COVID-19 reporting. So, let’s take a look at this struggle with the effective communication of numbers and information, and how it has influenced the rise and fall of panic throughout the COVID-19 crisis.
Houston’s stay-at-home order was a bit of a slap in the face when the announcement came. I was definitely expecting the city to do something, they had to given the city’s status as one of the largest urban areas in the country, but learning that I would soon be unable to work (that all my plans were about to go more than a little askew) was not exactly my idea of a great belated birthday present.
My clinicals for my EMT-B course were being pushed back indefinitely, meaning moving in May was no longer an option, and whether or not fall classes would even happen was in question.
What a year to have been born in March.
That first week of the month, the number of COVID-19 cases around the world started ticking in an ominously upward direction. Monday, March 2, people were barely concerned. By the time that Sunday rolled around, there were more than 500 confirmed cases in the US and almost 90,000 in China.
People began to get nervous.
And when Trump declared a national emergency on March 13th, those nerves quickly began to morph into fear.
Things had escalated quickly. Valid, reliable information was scarce. And everyone’s reaction was to buy toilet paper.
All of these numbers started hitting the news, predictions and percentages and insane looking numbers often taken out of context or coming from questionable sources—CDC and WHO models and projections often overwhelmed by misinformation and nonsense on social media. Mortality and infection rates—both high and low—were thrown around like sure things when we in no way had enough information to be certain just how dangerous this disease was.
And people started to panic. Understandably so in this particular situation:
“What causes panic? Lack of understanding. The biggest factor in lack of understanding is a lack of information. When we don’t have situation-specific knowledge, we draw on whatever we know that seems close.
In my state of Florida (the Australia of the United States), that means any new disaster defaults to hurricane prep. Which is similar to what the rest of the country went with too. Basically, folks turned to the natural disaster preparation information they have heard over and over. Grab bottled water. Get shelf-stable food. Make sure you’ve got toilet paper aplenty. Maybe some flashlights.These are preparations for power and utility infrastructure losses—common in climate disasters, unlikely in a viral outbreak.
But, we haven’t educated people about what a disease outbreak means. Most of the response efforts on a personal level are things we should have already been doing: cough into your sleeve/elbow, wash your hands with just a modicum of attention, and give people sick leave (and encourage its use!).”
I had the luxury to prepare as though we were facing a hurricane as well. There are so many cans in the pantry, I can’t open it without facing a soup-and-beans avalanche. Medications and first aid supplies fill the drawers in the bathroom. The dog and cat have enough food for 3 months.
As Alex said, even those of us who regularly prepare for disasters had little experience with how to prepare for a pandemic, and the information we were receiving as a country did little to calm our collective panic as the public level of emotion skyrocketed.
Hand sanitizer disappeared from the shelves, then bleach. There was little communication about what cleaners were actually effective in combating the virus (now there is an EPA list), contradictory alcohol content percentages were thrown around like confetti, and I only got a reliable list from an American Red Cross Instagram post a couple of weeks after shit hit the fan (thankfully, there is a full jug of hydrogen peroxide in our bathroom cabinet).
A slew of things were being hoarded that, on a rational level, really were not all that important or likely to run out under reasonable use:
“We see a lot of advertising psychology come into play. Runs on hand sanitizer and cleaning wipes, rather than soap and liquid cleaners. People have been inundated with the message that hand sanitizer sanitizes, and that it is somehow better than hand washing. That wipes make things clean.
But handwashing is incredibly effective. Hand sanitizer is fine if you cannot wash your hands. But it should be saved for that. Hand washing is just as effective (and way cheaper/more sustainable). Liquid cleaners and a rag or paper towel are just as good, or better, than wipes. A 10% bleach solution will kill any known pathogen on a hard surface.
But people ignore these options and drive straight for hand sanitizer and Lysol wipes. Who says aggressive, constant advertising in a vacuum of knowledge doesn’t work?”
A vacuum of reliable information is exactly what we were seeing. As soon as any information was available, reliable or not, authentic or not, it found its way into the national consciousness. Official channels for public health outreach tried to provide much needed information, but their efforts were garbled and hamstrung by the president’s insistence on speaking at every COVID-19 press conference.
People latched onto any information or supplies they could get. In a lot of cases, that was toilet paper and hand sanitizer. People were purchasing utilitarian goods in an attempt to assuage the primal fear of not knowing what to do, and as a gut reaction to the idea that the most effective response to a global pandemic is good old-fashioned handwashing.
The public was not doing this because people were being stupid or because people were panicking for no reason (it is now obvious they had plenty of reason to panic), it was because people needed to feel like they had some power over the situation, because people needed to do something.
Alex and I weren’t any different, training or no. I can say without exaggeration that I felt powerless to respond, and that that information vacuum played a huge role in my decision to buy supplies, even if I declined to hoard 12 years’ worth of toilet paper.
Trump continually went back and forth on what he wanted people to do, moved around deadlines, and took an exceedingly long time to recognize that no, we could not reopen the country for Easter.
CDC guidelines shifted as we learned more about the disease, and sometimes conflicted with those put out by the WHO.
Do we wear masks? Do we not wear masks? What kind of masks? Can we reuse masks?
It took too long to get answers, and in the meantime people who were not public health experts spread rumors and random numbers pulled out of a hat that had no bearing on reality. The average person (heck, even trained personnel) had little hope of untangling this whole communication mess, and natural emotions such as anxiety and fear made decision-making much more difficult. So, picking out the few things we could actually do in the midst of all the chaos felt virtually impossible.
And all the while, the case numbers and mortality rates and virus-related data points kept flowing.
First we were supposed to keep gatherings under 50 people, then it dropped to 10. Percentages indicating how fatal COVID-19 was were thrown around like a certainty when they were preliminary at best, panic-inducing misinformation at worst depending on who they were coming from.
Incubation periods were found to be up to 14 days, and quarantine became normal parlance in our day-to-day lives. Confirmed cases moved from 581 on Monday, March 9, to 4,456 on Sunday, March 15 in the United States alone.
For my part, the demographic information and infection rates helped keep me complacent. I could focus on the overflow of information about elderly folks being most at risk and a low infection rate for younger people, and convince myself that it was okay if I kept working because of that, which was patently false. There was little information being provided that contradicted that thought process, and I declined to think critically about the information I was receiving because it was exactly what I wanted to hear.
Now that I have had time to process, digest, and really think through the situation, questioning every piece of information I receive is exactly what I’m doing. And Alex and I are trying to parse through all the numbers and information out there in order to give people real, concrete action they can take—both to help people feel productive and useful (thereby helping to stave off at least a modicum of panic) and to perhaps keep some grocery store shelves a little less empty for those who couldn’t afford to hoard in the first place.
