Irresponsible Journalism: What happens when you don’t understand COVID19 and flattening the curve
Recently, one of Canada’s national magazines published an article on how Canada was “not flattening the curve”. I would like to point out how this is irresponsible journalism and how this is a great example of how the media has to feed you something, anything, regardless of whether it is useful or not, because its purpose is to get you to consume it — even if it makes EVERYTHING WORSE.
The main thing you have to understand about “flattening the curve” is that its purpose is not to limit the number of infections, but rather the number of people who need (to keep things very simple) a bed in the intensive care unit (ICU) at any given time. When you need an ICU bed, chances are you can’t breathe on your own and you probably can’t actually be alive on your own. So a machine breathes for you and drugs keep you alive.
Flattening the curve means that we are trying to SLOW the rate of new infections because there is a fairly fixed percentage of new infections that will need an ICU bed. If we can slow it down enough, then we won’t have to make the really difficult decisions of “who gets the last ICU bed?” Everyone who needs an ICU bed will get one and therefore optimize their chances for surviving this (though for some, even an ICU bed will not be enough.)
However, just because the rate of infections slows down, doesn’t mean that the number of people getting infected will be lower overall. Proponents of flattening the curve know full well that the area under the curve is basically the same whether the curve is flattened or not.
Here’s the big catch though: We won’t actually know if we managed to flatten the curve until everything is essentially over. A curve cannot be defined until it peaks. And for a peak to be recognized, the curve first has to go down. We might know that we failed to flatten it if the system becomes overwhelmed, but if that never happens (fingers crossed), then we will likely assume that we managed to flatten it.
But if the system never gets overwhelmed, we won’t ever know for sure; because life isn’t neat and tidy like that. We won’t know if things would have been fine without “flattening measures”. We will only be able to guess. And that’s not say that our guesses won’t be pretty good, or that it’s pointless to engage in flattening behaviours; but for someone to outright say, “The system is not overwhelmed but the rate of new cases says that we are not flattening the curve” is both fear-mongering and irresponsible.
Curve flattening also isn’t an all or nothing phenomenon. Even if the system gets overloaded, reducing the peak means fewer people die because of a lack of resources.
I won’t talk in depth about the fact that the author of the piece has no real biography on the Maclean’s website that would be easily found and that a Google search only yields an authors whose claim to fame is as a “Royals Watcher” (as in the British royal family). Someone who is inexperienced in a given field is not incapable of writing thoughtful and useful pieces. But regardless of experience, the author has really missed the boat because she fails to understand the underlying nature of the curve itself, its purpose and how flattening is ultimately defined.
And publishing a piece on a topic that you fail to understand sufficiently, is both irresponsible and unprofessional.
