Society's COVID Disconnect - a product of perceiving numbers

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In the debate over vaccines--and about COVID as a whole--the disconnect between the two sides is largely due to perception (numbers).

The first image is a tweet from a popular scientist showing the hotspots currently in America. It looks scary down South.

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The second image is this scientist offering corresponding numbers.

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Let's round up and say LA and FL each have 100 cases for every 100,000 residents. That's one out of every 1000 people, during a surge. I don't know what the tipping point would be for near-unanimous alarm regarding a pandemic, but it isn't one in a thousand.

This isn't to say COVID is not deadly serious; it's to point out that this is simply an issue of human psychology and sociology. It's hard to get everyone to cooperate with these numbers. And an example of the resulting disconnect in America is that one side sees the first image and the other side sees the second.



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6 comments
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While I agree that perception about numbers has something to do with it, I think that is by far not the most important reason. Polling shows the political divide to be the larger issue.

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Politics is indeed dominant in all this. Are you really altleft? What does that mean exactly?

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It was just a joke, because I'm very interested in politics, but don't match well with any established political ideology that I've ever heard of. And since altright is the new buzzword, I went with altleft.

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When altright became popular, some asked about an altleft. One replied there should be a cntl-left:)

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(Edited)

When it comes down to it, I think Eric Weinstein's theory is the most unifying: The harsh lockdowns and other restrictive measures flow from the politicians and institutional leaders who have failed to prepare for a pandemic, despite plenty of available foresight. And these measures are their collective failure to live up to their responsibilities. The responsibility was offloaded en masse to the people of the world and the global economy, with catastrophic but predictable results.

SARS should have taught some lessons and it did, except to the majority of people who were in the positions to make decisions to prepare. Preparation means reasonable surveillance and plans to react to a spreading disease. It means stockpiling of medical supplies for a rainy day. It means preparing for an occasional spike in hospital and ICU demand.

Instead, seeing a potential body count because these so-called leaders failed to prepare, they offloaded the responsibility to everyone else, and then claimed the moral high ground if people didn't want to drastically change their way of life. The people in a position to prepare that knew better, and did nothing (or even worse sometimes actively removed preparations) have no ground to stand on.

Why is it unifying? Because it puts the responsibility for the failures of governance, preparation, and leadership on the people that it belongs to. Rather than bicker with team A vs team B, we as a whole need to hold the people that made every poor decision accountable.

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Hear, hear.

I then ask how it is such people got into power. I've been wondering this for 15 years, watching poor leaders run for office while good leaders devoted their lives elsewhere. I don't see this changing:/ So, in my view, it's best then that gov't lessens in its influence over our lives. Smart, outspoken people like Weinstein can perhaps wield more power of their own.

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