How an interview on COVID-19 made me think about science communication

Science communication is not good enough if it doesn’t teach you something. “Spectacular” and “dramatic” science communication, in the style of most big budget documentaries today, plays on your emotions, not on your intellect. It’s entertainment — often not innocent of ideological propaganda — disguised as respectable science.

Have you ever asked yourself, at the end of a documentary, “What have I learnt? What is the one piece of information I have retained?”

I regularly do this exercise, and the answer is often an image, or an emotion — or a conclusion, like ‘I should be afraid of sharks’ or ‘NASA is cool.’ But do you really know anything about sharks mating habits, or what engineers at NASA do?

We have recently been exposed to a flood of communication on COVID-19. Not technically documentaries, but interviews, briefs by more or less experts, articles, all sorts of formats. The general scenario is too complex for a single dimension analysis, but words like confusing, contradicting, sometimes downright inaccurate and false, are not out of place.

Whatever clip or segment we have watched, that purports to be informative, has it taught us something? What clear piece of new information did it add to our repertoire of references to orient ourselves in the world, to know how to behave during these uncertain times? I think that there has been very little scientific communication to speak of, certainly too little in proportion with the plethora of ‘experts’ that appeared on screen. So many experts, so little knowledge.

So little useful information. Was it science communication at all? Arguably, not. But we’ve called it that, we’ve watched it like that. So, there’s something wrong with our concept of science communication, or with science communication itself. Not for me to disentangle here, but this is the landscape that faced when I decided to interview bio-mathematician Maíra Aguiar, a Marie Curie fellow and a member of the Basque Modelling Task Force that is assisting the public Health Managers and the Basque Government during the COVID-19 responses.

I’m not saying that science communication is easy. It’s not that everybody is doing it wrong, and now here I come: one woman, one researcher, one podcaster, showing the world how to do it right. But by being critical of other people’s work, I offer my own work up to the critics, and all of us together must discern what is good communication and what is not. What information we decide to agree upon, and what is noise. So, what did I do?

I reached out to Maíra, someone I knew from the Marie Curie Actions community, to ask her about some doubts I had on COVID-19. A private conversation, nothing more. But her answers were so informative, her explanations shed light on my doubts, I had a lot of ‘a-ha’ moments that I decided I wanted to use my time and skills to share that information. That’s how this interview came to be.

I just know that people don’t know certain basic things, that if you go in the street and ask how SARS went away, or what exactly herd immunity is, they will give rambling answers. And if there’s something I’m good at, is asking these questions. Yes, the stupid questions. The fundamentals. Most problems in communication and understanding, in my experience, are nested there.

There are heaps of questions I wanted to ask Maíra, but we had to keep the interview relatively short (we ended up with 20 min), so, we came up with the idea of follow-up videos that would answer one question each (soon to appear on my YouTube channel and social media). Wanting to be of service to the community –without being pretentious but seriously taking on a commitment– we decided to give the audience the possibility to submit questions (through this form).

I am aware this video has a limited impact, I am not delusional about my presence online. This is not the BBC. But the spirit with which we did it is: clear information, and no tributes to ‘being pretty,’ no secondary messages. Minimize the confusion and offer a couple of reliable points — not up for debate, not opinions, but facts. Actually, ‘knowledge’ rather than facts, because knowledge is two steps above facts. Facts are not enough: science teaches us about the nature of the physical world, but it does not tell us how to behave in the world. It can inform our decision, but it does not produce the answers about how to live, how to be social, how to feel about a pandemic. This is how good science communication looks like for me. Whether we succeeded with this video, it’s for you to judge.

Some of the questions I asked Maíra in the video, which you can watch below:

1. Every country seems to be pushing its own research. Is there coordination at international level? I asked this question because it strangely seemed anti-scientific to me that every country would “take care of their own people,” in terms of lockdown measures, health policies, researching a vaccine, etc.

2. Maíra walks us through the website where the Basque government is sharing updates on the outbreak as well as simulations and interesting tools for visitors to play with. Maíra does not go into the details of any part of the website, leaving this for the follow-up videos:

3. What is “herd immunity” exactly? The words suggest that we ALL need to catch the virus, be sick, and get over it — provided that today we have no guarantee that catching (and surviving) COVID-19 grants (long-lasting) immunity.

4. There have been other new viruses even just in our lifetime: the bird flu, SARS… I didn’t catch any of these (luckily), but I don’t remember being vaccinated. So how did they go away? And can the same happen for COVID-19?

5. What do you think of the job that the media have done in handling this pandemic?

6. What are reliable sources for information on COVID-19?

- John Hopkins Corona Virus Research Centre: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

- Worldometers.info: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

- https://www.endcoronavirus.org led by prof. Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI)

- Basque country daily reports: https://www.euskadi.eus/boletin-de-datos-sobre-la-evolucion-del-coronavirus/web01-a2korona/es/

7. You’re also a mom. You have two young girls. How has it been to handle the lockdown?

8. Like Pierre and Marie Curie, you work with your husband! He is a theoretical physicist and involved in the same COVID-19 research. How is that working?

Watch the video here:

Biographies:

Federica Bressan is a Fulbright scholar and Marie Curie alumna. She holds a PhD in Computer Science and two MDs in Music and Musicology. Appointed Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia, she is currently developing a new line of research that combines technology, cultural studies, product design, and communication. Her expertise in the last 10 years has been in multimedia preservation, with a special attention for audio and interactivity. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Ghent Center for Digital Humanities and of the “Sarton” Center for History of Science at Ghent University. She organized and chaired several international scientific events and served as guest editor for the special issue on Digital Philology for Multimedia Cultural Heritage, of the Journal of New Music Research. She produces and hosts the podcast Technoculture . Full CV and list of publications: http://research.federicabressan.com

Maíra Aguiar is a Marie Curie fellow at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Trento (Italy), since January 2019. Maíra is a biologist by training and holds a double PhD degree in Life Sciences, from the VU in Amsterdam, and in Biology, with a specialty in population Biology, from the University of Lisbon. Her background is in laboratory and field epidemiology, but in recent years she has been working in applied mathematics, in close collaboration with laboratories and bureaus of epidemiology. Her MSC project focuses on dynamical systems theory, which studies the origin of the chaotic dynamics in multi-strain epidemiological models. The project’s scope has recently been extended in order to include research on the COVID-19 pandemic. Follow her on Twitter: @mairaguiar_epi

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