> It wouldn't have, uncertainty creates general panic as well, that soon turns into disarray of chaotic recommendations among the masses.
A disarray of chaotic recommendations from on high is preferable, I guess?
I especially enjoyed viewing the early covid health department stickers later on. While masks were mandatory, there were health department stickers everywhere from a couple months earlier telling us that they were unhelpful.
I know nuance is hard, but it is entirely understandable that many people have distrust in authority when the message seemed to be high confidence do A(t) and A(t) was often contradictory to A(t-1). At that point, people pick the A(t) that had the advice they like.
When there were things like tell people masks are ineffective because they actually are effective but in limited supply, that also breeds distrust. I don't know how you solve that one, other than having a functional pandemic response logistics chain, and I don't think we ever had that; we did some supply warehousing after SARS but without a process to refresh the stock, it was not effective for COVID. I suspect there's no effort to build that up again, but I'd love to be wrong; my impressions are that the US healthcare and disease control ecosystem has not learned anything from COVID, again, I hope I'm wrong. Maybe acceptance of mRNA based vaccination and some amount of deployment of genetic identification of infection from patients.
A disarray of chaotic recommendations from on high is preferable, I guess?
I especially enjoyed viewing the early covid health department stickers later on. While masks were mandatory, there were health department stickers everywhere from a couple months earlier telling us that they were unhelpful.
I know nuance is hard, but it is entirely understandable that many people have distrust in authority when the message seemed to be high confidence do A(t) and A(t) was often contradictory to A(t-1). At that point, people pick the A(t) that had the advice they like.
When there were things like tell people masks are ineffective because they actually are effective but in limited supply, that also breeds distrust. I don't know how you solve that one, other than having a functional pandemic response logistics chain, and I don't think we ever had that; we did some supply warehousing after SARS but without a process to refresh the stock, it was not effective for COVID. I suspect there's no effort to build that up again, but I'd love to be wrong; my impressions are that the US healthcare and disease control ecosystem has not learned anything from COVID, again, I hope I'm wrong. Maybe acceptance of mRNA based vaccination and some amount of deployment of genetic identification of infection from patients.