The Boy Who Cried Covid

Happily for us all, psychologists like Penn’s Adam Grant are here to enlighten us. If you do not know anything about psychology, you will still agree to his basic point. People are tired of being warned about Covid, so they are tuning out the message. They are suffering from apocalypse fatigue. 

Grant will show us how the current condition works exactly the way that cognitive treatments work to mitigate the pain of phobias. And yet, for those less savvy in the psycho arts, the truth of this principle lies in an Aesop fable: The boy who cried wolf.

It’s message is simple. The more often you sound an alarm without there being dire consequences, the more people will tune out your alarms. A fair point, worth a newspaper column.

Grant describes the way that news reporting has desensitized us to the dangers of Covid. This assumes that the dangers have not been overhyped for political reasons-- point that ought to be factored into the equation.

It could have been a scene straight out of an apocalyptic horror movie. When the World Health Organization declared the Omicron variant of the coronavirus a “variant of concern” in late November, borders closed, markets tumbled and warnings spread about how this new threat could ravage the world’s population.

And then … many of us went right back to whatever we were doing. In a poll of Americans conducted from Dec. 3 to Dec. 6, almost all — 94 percent — had heard of Omicron. Despite questions that remain unanswered about Omicron’s risks and whether it can evade vaccines, only 23 percent said they were likely to cancel their holiday plans, and 28 percent said they were likely to stop gathering with others outside their households.

It’s a stark difference from when the pandemic first started. Back then, as we learned of this new highly contagious and deadly disease with no vaccine or treatment, many of us stocked up on food and toilet paper, started wiping down our groceries and went into lockdown, only venturing out with protective gear.

So, our public health authorities and our politicians have largely cured us of our fear of Covid. This has made us more difficult to manipulate, to the chagrin of health authorities.

But many people aren’t so afraid of Covid-19 anymore, complicating public health authorities’ efforts to slow Omicron’s spread. We’ve all seen this horror movie before, and when you’ve watched the killer jump out brandishing a weapon 10 times — even when you’ve watched him kill — it just doesn’t freak you out the same way. The same rerun has been playing for 21 months. We’re living through a phenomenon that risk experts might call a “boring apocalypse.”

The seemingly constant flow of emergency alerts has dulled many people’s fear response to this pandemic, leading them to let down their guard, relax their restrictions or masking habits, or even refuse potentially lifesaving vaccines. Why? We’ve basically all been through one of the best available therapies for extinguishing extreme fear.

A nice point-- it’s all been like a course of treatment in behavioral therapy, the kind that has notably been successful in treating phobias:

When that response is overactive — especially if you have a phobia — psychologists often recommend exposure therapy. The goal is to make you so familiar with the source of your fear that it no longer seems like a threat. Your amygdala takes a nap and your prefrontal cortex takes over, allowing you to think rationally about whether that daddy longlegs in the bathtub is really a danger.

How does behavior therapy work on phobias? Grant explains:

Therapists generally use one of two approaches to exposure therapy: systematic desensitization and flooding. Systematic desensitization involves introducing the threat in small doses and gradually increasing it over time. You might start off looking at pictures of spiders, and then encounter a live spider in a sealed cage across the room. You learn to manage your fear in less threatening situations before you get up close and personal with the creepy creature.

Flooding, on the other hand, involves putting you right in the middle of your nightmare. A therapist might drop a spider onto your lap. Yes, you’ll probably panic, but the hope is that after surviving the experience unscathed you’ll quickly realize that your terror was misplaced, and you’ll be less afraid of spiders after that.

The same principle explains why people are no longer panicking about Covid:

Each new wave of communication since then has operated as a form of systematic desensitization. People around the world have been through so many alarms — both real and false — that many have been conditioned to stop fearing Covid-19 in the same way. And every trip outside the house that doesn’t result in people getting sick can serve to desensitize them further. At this point, it’s as if we have built up antibodies against fear.

If a Covid-19 variant falls in a community and no one is there to fear it, does it still make a sound?

As happened with the boy who cried wolf, using fear to motivate has its limitations:

Fear generally works best for motivating one-time acts, especially those that feel risky. Last year, fear was probably an effective way to motivate people to get their first vaccine shot. But it tends to be less effective for driving repeated behaviors such as getting a second dose and a booster.

For a fear message to get through and change behaviors, people need to be confident both that there’s a clear and present danger and that taking action will protect them.

You may refer to Grant’s article if you wish to discover his recommendations for better communication. Not to sound any more churlish than usual, but I would point out that Grant ignores some parts of the public health messaging. 

He ignores vaccine mandates, efforts by the federal and local governments to force people to be vaccinated, firing people for refusing to get vaccinated, some of which have been rejected by courts, all of which suggest a will to control people.

In the world of psycho science, researchers have also discovered that when you coerce people into doing something, the more you coerce, the more they push back. Aside from the fact that most people would rather save face than cave to governmental pressure, the truth remains, if you have to go all hysterical in selling a product, that usually means that the product is defective. It means that the product cannot sell itself.

And besides, in the matter of messaging, serious Democratic politicians insisted that they would not take what Kamala herself called the Trump vaccine. Once you politicize science, it loses the name of science and becomes yet another effort at mind control.