Living with risk in the season of the virus: Four questions with David Ropeik

A Senior Influence exclusive.

1. How do we lay people (not medical folks or risk experts) get our heads around the current quarantine orders? In other words, how do we assess the risk to ourselves from the virus?

Personal risk assessment, rather than expert/science-based assessment, is mostly a matter of how we feel. That is determined by our life circumstances (age, health, education, socioeconomic status, etc.), what we’ve learned about the risk (or others like it, eg. SARS, H1N1), and by a set of psychological characteristics we all share that make some risks feel scarier than others. How we feel about risk of the disease is influenced by the fact that it’s new, which means there are things we don’t know about it, which means we don’t fully know how to protect ourselves. We feel powerless, vulnerable. That’s why we buy toilet paper and masks, to give ourselves a sense of control. The risk of the disease is also impacted by the prominence it’s playing in our consciousness. That ever-present sense of potential danger sends a powerful emotional message to the brain that overwhelms our reasoning ability to keep the risk in perspective. Ergo, people too afraid to go shopping for food. Further, we get our information from sources we trust, and accept it because we trust the sources, without checking it out. Much of the information people share about a risk emphasizes the alarming parts…It’s how we social animals keep each other safe. But as a result, the bulk of the information we’re using is amplifying fear, and is often incomplete or incorrect.

Regarding quarantine; our social behaviors are driven by other instincts also connected with keeping ourselves safe and alive. In this case, the pandemic is triggering the instinct toward social altruism we feel at times when we all feel threatened by the same thing at the same time. Sacrifice in the name of the greater common good not only others but helps us feel safer and more protected too. Some refuse to self-isolate, but notice that they get scolded for such behavior.

2. Do you think the shelter-in-place advisory is a good one? What might you advise differently, if anything?

I have no expertise in what public health measures might help re: the disease itself. I can say that our increased worry puts us in a mini Fight or Flight or Freeze mode, and that is directly harmful to our health in many ways. It raises our blood pressure and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. It weakens our immune system and makes it more likely we’ll catch, or suffer worse from, any infectious disease. It raises the risk of adult onset (Type 2) diabetes, the likelihood and severity of clinical depression, and impairs our fertility, bone growth, and digestive system. The chronic stress we’re experiencing both from fear of the disease and from the uncertainty of “what’s normal”, in addition to the anxiety from isolation and loss of freedom of movement, AND the anxiety from reduced in-person social contact, are all contributing to massive health harm not from the disease but how it’s making us feel.\ \ 3. How long do you think the stay-at-home directive should last to be effective?

All public health experts say that breaking the chain of spreading infection by staying home and practicing good hygiene when we got out is critical for our own health and the greater common good.\ \ 4. Finally, at the end of the pandemic, what will society look like, in your opinion?

When this peters out into an infectious disease that will be around but has hit all the naïve subjects and starts bumping into the immune subjects it has left behind, or is a disease against which we can be vaccinated, we will be left with a few important lessons. First, that we CAN come together, but only when we are all viscerally personally currently worried about the same thing at the same time. When climate change finally feels that way to us (it doesn’t feel current or personal to most of us yet), that lesson may be useful. My guess is that charitable giving will be higher for quite some time. The government pouring resources into helping society, so foreign to conservatives, may shift decision making on other social welfare programs. Gonna be harder, for example, to propose cutting Medicare or Social Security, are even the Affordable Care Act. We will have a different relationship to work, having experienced that working from home can actually work. That could bear on commuting, and air pollution. There will be tons of long term economic challenges to people whose didn’t have the resources to get through this, millions threatened with homelessness, loss of businesses, different retirement lives because of lost investments.