Angering Ourselves To Death: Interlude I
In March-April 2020, researchers from Stanford University conducted a large-scale survey of “antibody seroprevalence” of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in Santa Clara County, California. Researchers called for participants using targeted Facebook advertisements to get a representative sample of the population (1.81 million) and gained 3,300 volunteers. According to the study:
“Under the three scenarios for test performance characteristics, the population prevalence of COVID-19 in Santa Clara ranged from 2.49% (95CI 1.80–3.17%) to 4.16% (2.58–5.70%). These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50–85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases…. The population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases.”
Further studies by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health showed a highly correlative figure: “approximately 4.1% of the county’s adult population has an antibody to the virus.”
This suggests that more people could have contracted COVID-19 and paid no more attention to it than if it was a common cold, and recovered. This also dilutes by 50 to 80 times the case fatality rate of 3–4% parroted by some news media.
What does all this mean? The worst answer any person being featured by mass media or communication can give: We don’t really know yet.
We cannot have an opinion on something that has not been borne to its full conclusion, but we continue to anyway. We have been conditioned as such in the past 50 years of news media consumption.
In his masterwork Amusing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman, the father of media ecology, describes the Iranian Revolution of 1980 and Iran-Contra affair as the news media playing up the event as “entertainment” and giving rise to opinions in one form or another despite most Americans not knowing what language Iranians speak or what power or function an Ayatollah has.
He called this disinformation:
“Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”¹
Okay. But why?
Here’s one theory. Despite our increased knowledge in and applications of non-Euclidian geometry and non-Newtonian physics, we as a species have struggled to grasp the next frontier in human scientific breakthrough, that being non-Aristotelian logic.
Non-Aristotelian logic and its relation to the structure of communication was first expounded in 1933’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. It was written by Count Alfred Korzybski, a Polish engineer and mathematician who founded the branch of study now known as General Semantics. The central tenet of General Semantics is “the map is not the territory,” or “what is symbolised is not the thing or object itself.”
Think of it this way: there is nothing “sticky” about the word stick, when uttered. It is a collection of sounds reproduced to represent an object in the real world. This is the beginning of our semantic confusion. Add to this homonyms and deep structural experiences that colour our interpretation of words — stick as in “adhere” over stick as in “a twig or small branch” or even a “smooth pole or rod” — and the human mind is ripe for semantic exploitation.
The Vaccine Is Coming… Right?
Depending on who you talk to here in Australia, everyone has a different idea on how long these lockdown or social distancing measures will last.
Some say until the end of May this year. Ask others, they may say six months.
Different people say, “until the vaccine is developed.”
If we lock down populations and release them only after a vaccine is developed, we may not have any economy or civilisation worth salvaging.
The “vaccine is coming” meme has wide prevalence despite there being no vaccine developed for similar beta coronavirus outbreaks: most notably the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus in 2002–2004 (SARS-CoV) and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2009. Since the viruses in these instances all but died out, most vaccine candidates did not move past Phase I testing.
Candidate vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 are in accelerated development but their efficacy will not be known for some time. According to an article published on April 6th in the Immunity journal by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai, New York:
“Given that the population is currently naive to SARS-CoV-2, it is highly likely that more than one dose of the vaccine will be needed. Prime-boost vaccination regimens are typically used in such cases, and the two vaccinations are usually spaced 3–4 weeks apart. It is likely that protective immunity will be achieved only 1–2 weeks after the second vaccination. This therefore adds another 1–2 months to the timeline. Even if shortcuts for several of the steps mentioned earlier can be found, it is unlikely that a vaccine would be available earlier than 6 months after the initiation of clinical trials. Realistically, SARS-CoV-2 vaccines will not be available for another 12–18 months.”
Post-infection therapeutics indicate more efficacy than any potential vaccine such as already existing HIV inhibitors (lopinavir and ritonavir), nucleotide analogs (remdesvir), fusion inhibitors (arbidol), and the often-mentioned anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine.
So why so much hope in a vaccine that may or may not work?
Dr. Ioannidis also states that “extreme measures such as lockdowns may have major impact on social life and the economy (and those also lives lost), and estimates of this impact are entirely speculative.” As Dr. David L. Katz, president of True Health Initiative and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Centre, wrote for The New York Times, “horizontal interdiction” or “when containment policies are applied to the entire population without consideration of their risk for severe infection” can cause more social upheaval than the effects of the virus itself, where the “vaccine is coming” scenario seems more harmful than good.
Where did this “vaccine saviour” meme come from, and why has it spread with more virulence than SARS-CoV-2 does in populations?
Let’s Not Get all Baudrillard on Our Asses
Though it’s tempting to channel French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and say The COVID-19 Pandemic Did Not Take Place much like The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, future generations may view our response to the pandemic as a failure of public policy, public science, and proliferation of disinformation by news media.
A cautious, but scientific-based approach could still “flatten the curve” of infection (which also means widening the curve — the flatter the curve, the longer the pandemic lasts) while opening up sectors of the economy and allowing loved ones to gather in small numbers.
If we can use our consciousness of abstraction, the realisation that some statements and “facts” are reasoned backwards from judgements and inferences instead of from observations, we may be closer to agreeing on what needs to be done instead of using draconian shelter-in-place measures for months on end.
Six weeks into lockdown, we’ve seen people protest in the streets, begging legislatures to allow people to return to work and earn a living in some states across the United States.
The logic of scientific discovery has no tribe. If you watch the news, you’d be forgiven to think there most certainly was.
Don’t take my word for it though. I could be wrong.
Works Cited
[1] Postman, N., Amusing Ourselves to Death, Penguin Books, London. (1985) p. 107.
