Fighting a battle on two fronts

Living in Singapore, and working to keep a school going during the Covid-19 situation is proving to be challenging (obviously) but also providing fascinating insights into how we operate as individuals and as groups.   We've followed official guidance; cancelled most schools events and trips, adjusted or restricted many others, instituted hygiene and temperature-taking measures, and denied many visitors to campus.  There has been a range of valid reactions.

In our 15,000 strong community we have some who think that these precautions are an over-reaction, and that we should largely carry on with business as usual.  Others feel that school closure is the only sensible option.  Both views are absolutely understandable, and alas, not resolvable.  Perhaps hindsight will give us the wisdom we need (I doubt it) but at this moment we have no access to 'correct' actions, should such things even exist.  So there are judgments to be made.  My own tendency is to look at the data, comparative cases, risk levels and so on - a kind of 'in these difficult circumstances we have to set aside our emotions and take a rational approach' style, but as I was debating with a colleague I realised I was less objective than I had thought.  I've come to see that advocating for rationality is actually just another, less obvious form of emotional influencing.  I was really saying that one set of feelings (say, those about the importance of maintain education for our students) was more important than another set (say, about people's worries over the health of their kids).  Both sets are valuable; there is no completely rational trade-off; just preference and varying degrees of appetite for risk.   Rationality cannot provide the answers: there is no total escape from subjectivity here.

Chua Mui Hoong, Straits Times opinion editor, generalizes this little anecdote: With spread of the virus, the battle has to be fought on both the medical and psychological fronts... [It is] as much about mindsets as it is about medicine.   This was obvious last weekend, where (short-lived) panic buying stripped supermarkets of staples - despite zero need to do so.   It doesn't help to call that behaviour irrational, or to lament it; we need to understand and work with it.

Media Inflamed Fears: Scares which have not 'rationally' deserved the coverage. 
Is the problem the media or our conception that things should be rational? source

Recognising that, it helps to understand the source of our feelings.  The story has - like SARS, H1N1, Ebola and MERS before - generated massive media interest.  While there is for sure a massive public interest here, it's also an opportunity for a revenue-focussed media to get a lot of traffic.  I hesitate to call all the online coverage clickbait, but some of it is; so much so that lecturer Connal Lee has suggested that Covid-19 is as much an 'infodemic' as an epidemic (here's a great example of an incorrect, now debunked alarmist story that went  - ahem - viral).  The issue is less the volume, and more the type of coverage. Researchers Yotam Ophir and journalist Stacey Lu have argued that media has predominantly focussed on (often extreme) human-interest stories rather than on providing practical coping information.   Exposure to media is, therefore, more likely to inflame a worried populace than to calm and reassure.

There is, of course, also a great deal of excellent coverage.   Perhaps because of tight links between government and media, and a largely compliant population, accurate and reassuring messages are not hard to find; and this address by the Singaporean Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong is a masterclass in communication (a colleague asked if UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson would have done it better.  He might have been funnier, but the trouble is that no-one would have believed him.  And of course that problem goes well beyond this particular issue).

It nevertheless remains the fact that Covid-19 is a scary thing.  Communicating about viruses is rather like the problem of communicating about radioactivity; that is, compounded by well-known risk factors:  viruses are invisible, potentially fatal, impossible to avoid in the environment, not well-understood and not readily controlled.  We will have strong emotional reactions; so the best we can do is to ensure that they are well-informed emotional reactions.  Getting away from alarmist and sensational news stories is the first step.

References

• Chua, M.H. (2020) Coronavirus: Fighting a psychological battle. Straits Times
• Kucharski, A. (2020) Misinformation on the coronavirus might be the most contagious thing about it.  The Guardian
• Lee, C. (2020) We’re in danger of drowning in a coronavirus ‘infodemic’. Here’s how we can cut through the noise The Conversation
• Lu, S. (2015). An epidemic of fear: Psychologists’ research is guiding governments and health leaders in their efforts to communicate with the public during disease outbreaks. Monitor on Psychology
• McCandless, D. and Bergamaschi F. (2019) Mountains out of Molehills. Information is Beautiful
  Ophir, Y. (2018, August 15). How media coverage of epidemics helps raise anxiety and reduce trust.  Nieman Lab