Three months ago, coronavirus was a little viral outbreak in a Chinese city that few had ever heard of. Now, global confirmed cases sit at close to 1.5 million and deaths at close to 88,000, though these stats may have doubled by the time you’re reading this.
There has been a lot of panic, along with finger-pointing, market-crashing and reckless champagne-glass-clinking. Continuing to visit pubs, clubs and cafes at such an advanced stage was potentially irresponsible on the part of many. But how should we act in a situation like this? Despite all the zombie apocalypse training we’ve had over the years through popular entertainment, I would argue very few of us really know what to do in a pandemic.
When I started writing this article, confirmed cases were less than 200,000 globally and about half of those had already recovered. I didn’t want to write about the coronavirus because I didn’t want to add to the hype. Now it seems the hype was warranted, but it was also creating unnecessary panic.
There will always be balancing issues with managing situations like this. Those unaffected may think containment measures are excessive; those whose loved ones are dealing with—or dying from—the virus may think any measures are insufficient. Very few places will ever get it completely right. But what’s interesting are the ways we get it quite consistently wrong.
Panic is an unfortunately common response to potential threats and one that often leads to more problems. For instance, the crowding of supermarkets in Australia to stockpile toilet paper and penne undoubtedly increased the risk of transmission—transmissions that could lead to deaths. And for what? The actual need for food didn’t go up. People weren’t eating more. The virus doesn’t give an infected person a higher caloric requirement. People were stocking up because they thought they wouldn’t be able to go to the supermarket to get what they needed. But precisely because of this behaviour people couldn’t get what they needed.
Sure, with the promise of isolation it makes sense to stockpile to an extent. But manufacturers aren’t ceasing production, supermarkets aren’t closing and there are other ways to get food to your front door. Either way, the supermarkets have started to refill and many people could have gotten by with the reserves of toilet paper they had. Plenty of poo-paper, none of the panic.
I’m not here to evangelise about how life would be better if we could just be rational, because I don’t hold that view unequivocally. But a little rationality could go a long way when the herd starts moving away from a threat. Of course, it isn’t helpful not to react at all; that’s denial, which is often the alternative response to panic. Get a good look at what the herd is moving from and then decide for yourself how far, how fast and in what direction you want to run from it.
So how do we be that little bit more rational in the face of viral pandemics and empty supermarket shelves? We could do a little research and if you’re even mildly scientifically literate, your fears might be allayed. But many of us wait for the pundits to tell us things like: ‘if I just randomly pick a person from the population and lick their face, I’d have a 0.01 per cent chance of licking an infected person, which is about the same chance of being hit by lightning in a single lifetime.’
While such statistical biscuits are reassuring for some, they don’t have a great track record for changing levels of panic or denial. Yet, it seems that whenever a threat rears its devastating head, some wily statistician promptly reminds us of how unlikely dying from it really is—that we’re more likely to get eaten by a shark or die brushing our teeth, or some other ridiculous thing.
The problem with comparing these probabilities is that it misses crucial aspects of the threats. The coronavirus, car accidents, heart disease, shark attacks and terrorist attacks are vastly different things, and not just in the numbers of the dead. Treating statistics as laws of physics detracts from the importance of how we act. In the case of coronavirus, I could raise my probability of infection by doing things like touching a spoon an infected person licked, or a door handle they pushed, or the train pole they sneezed on. How I control my risk of one threat looks different to controlling my risk of another. I can keep my distance from other people, from their spoons, poles and door handles, but I can’t disinfect myself of sharks or terrorists.
The fact that there are so many ways to behave around a threat makes it hard to know my risk. And it’s risk—the probability of loss—that statisticians are trying to give people a better sense of. The problem is that either we don’t think about risk before the threat becomes apparent, or we find any level of risk intolerable. Perhaps this is why the discussion of risk becomes a dry reactive one headed by statisticians. But what they are trying to say is valuable. Perhaps, if they change how they say it, and we change how we listen, we might actually learn something: we’re always at risk of something.
So, if we’re always at risk, why aren’t we constantly panicking? Constant panic would be an unsustainable way of living, but we can choose to ignore threats or choose not to see them. I think we should do our best to understand the threats that are out there and their associated risks. But even with that understanding, I feel the only reasonable response is to reduce your risk as best you can and carry on. What else can you do? You have to live. Adjusting your life to remove all risk might not leave you with much of a life to protect.
For now, the risk of dying from the coronavirus by going to the supermarket is still quite low for most people, especially with isolation measures in place. But this doesn’t mean we should go out and start sharing ice creams with the elderly. Strong measures make sense: some people are at an undoubtedly higher risk than others. You might even be one of them. So we sanitise, keep our distance and wait for further instructions from the relevant authority. If we do this right, we may have a chance against this virus. Then, perhaps we can return to sipping lattes and ‘normal’ life.
Kiall Camden is currently studying publishing and communications at University of Melbourne, and has strong interests in philosophy, science and psychology.