“In a pandemic, the strongest attractor of trust shouldn’t be confidence, but the recognition of one’s limits, the tendency to point at expertise beyond one’s own, and the willingness to work as part of a whole.” – Ed Yong

It’s been over 6 weeks since Californians have been in lock down and I’m still surprised by the pendulum of emotions I experience. I can’t attribute the swing to just one factor – there’s my dad’s passing, not seeing people, celebrating a birthday, knowing people are suffering, and of course, the uncertainty of when this will all end.

One thing I honestly hoped would come out of this pandemic was a sense of unity. That we were all globally in this together. So it disheartens me that there is still division. I see judgement, hypocrisy, a challenge to rage against “the man” (whoever “the man” is in this case), and a desire to hole up and live in echo chambers because it feels safe. I’m including myself in this description.

To be fair, I feel only mildly inconvenienced by this whole thing. I still have work. I still have food on my table and a roof over my head. I don’t personally know anyone in critical condition or who has died from COVID-19. I live in San Diego where we are experiencing summer-like weather and can sit outside at a park, go to the beach and be active, or have Costco items magically delivered by Instacart (seriously, what did I do before Instacart even in normal times?).

Here’s my main struggle: we are individually choosing what information to believe and what we label as entirely fear-based and unnecessary on one extreme or conspiracy on the other. And can we really blame ourselves when it’s all so darn confusing? (Check out this hilarious video about the contradictions in information and guidelines.)

I really appreciated this article by Ed Yong from The Atlantic that my friend Kristy shared. It clearly outlines why there is so much contradictory and confusing information. It’s long, but I promise it’s worth the read. (I’ve pulled out a few paragraphs below.)

So then the question becomes: how do you distinguish between wise, collectively-beneficial, health-promoting practices and harmful, overreaching violations of freedom that could lead to more dangerous ones? How do we choose wisdom over fear and where does the line exist?

Seriously, read that article. It was so grounding and explanatory.

My prayer is that in a few months, we’ll look back and see how we all came together. How the division grew smaller. That the forcing us together or alone realigned our priorities at a time it was needed most even if it wasn’t preferred. That the economy recovered and we recovered and that it was worth the human lives saved. I wish I could predict when this will all end, but alas, that’s the definition of uncertainty: not knowing.

In the meantime, I know I need to look inside and practice some of the things I preach. I want my cure to be compassion. My flag, empathy. For now, that’s the only thing I can be certain of.

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Excerpts from Ed Yong’s article linked to above:

• A lack of expertise becomes problematic when it’s combined with extreme overconfidence, and with society’s tendency to reward projected confidence over humility. “When scientists offer caveats instead of absolutes,” Gralinski says, “that uncertainty we’re trained to acknowledge makes it sound like no one knows what’s going on, and creates opportunities for people who present as skeptics.” Science itself isn’t free from that dynamic, either. Through flawed mechanisms like the Nobel Prize, the scientific world elevates individuals for work that is usually done by teams, and perpetuates the myth of the lone genius. Through attention, the media reward voices that are outspoken but not necessarily correct.
• Deaths are hard to tally in general, and the process differs among diseases. The CDC estimates that flu kills 24,000 to 62,000 Americans every year, a number that seems superficially similar to the 58,000 COVID-19 deaths thus far. That comparison is misleading. COVID-19 deaths are counted based either on a positive diagnostic test for the coronavirus or on clinical judgment. Flu deaths are estimated through a model that looks at hospitalizations and death certificates, and accounts for the possibility that many deaths are due to flu but aren’t coded as such. If flu deaths were counted like COVID-19 deaths, the number would be substantially lower. This doesn’t mean we’re overestimating the flu. It does mean we are probably underestimating COVID-19.
• I wander a world that has been irrevocably altered but that looks much the same. I can still read accounts of people less lucky—those who have lost, and those who have been lost. But I cannot read about the losses that never occurred, because they were averted. Prevention may be better than cure, but it is also less visceral.
• And the desire to name an antagonist, be it the Chinese Communist Party or Donald Trump, disregards the many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible: humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces; soaring levels of air travel; chronic underfunding of public health; a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains; health-care systems that yoke medical care to employment; social networks that rapidly spread misinformation; the devaluation of expertise; the marginalization of the elderly; and centuries of structural racism that impoverished the health of minorities and indigenous groups. It may be easier to believe that the coronavirus was deliberately unleashed than to accept the harsher truth that we built a world that was prone to it, but not ready for it.

[Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash]