Injecting Fear into Public Health Messaging to Control High-Risk Community Spread
When appeals to the collective good and personal responsibility reach their limit, you need to switch to fear and self-interest.
As we watch Doug Ford review the latest colour swatches for his newest regional framework, I am beginning to suspect that there probably isn’t any framework that we can’t break. With social spread accounting for almost half of our Covid transmissions, it is apparent that people are contracting the virus outside of the regulated settings contained within our frameworks. My neighbour’s house has never seen code red, and I’m willing to bet that it never will.
The public health messaging has remained consistent throughout the pandemic. Wash your hands and don’t touch your face, wear a mask and stay apart. Most of us understand this. Not everyone, though, and the people who aren’t getting it are really causing some real trouble. More technically, because of disproportionate risk profiles across individual behaviours, some people are really good at dispersing the virus. Specifically, my neighbour.
My neighbour seems to have missed the public health messages. He talks about personal responsibility but he doesn’t seem too committed to living out his sermons. I think we all have a neighbour or more like this. We are certainly aware of these people, and we are also aware that the furthest thing from their minds are colour-coded frameworks for regional openings and closures.
If we want to stop the spread of Covid, we need to stop the spread between people whose ears have gone deaf to preventative measures. There are some people who are simply having too much of a good time to stop, or else they just don’t find the virus all that scary. Many people are counting on the government to somehow do most of the heavy lifting, even though it’s clear that no Canadian government can or will.
We need to find a new way to sell our public health advice to a customer base that has never been interested in buying it. I have found that the best way to capture the attention of staunch individualists is to appeal to their selfishness and make them fearful. Never once have I sold anyone on a new way of life by showing them charts and statistics. Not when a trip to the morgue would do.
Public health messaging could benefit from a move away from case numbers and transmission metrics. I remember when 500 new cases per day was alarming. Then 1000, and now 1500. The numbers mean very little to me, although I have enough of a social imagination to figure it out and stay at home. My neighbour? He just turned up his music and the party went on into the night.
I’d like my neighbour to know just how full the ICU beds are, or the ravages of long term care. I wouldn’t mind if we used some more urgent backdrops for our press conferences. We need to bring the virus through their TV right into their living room, so they can cough on it some more. Until you can make the virus a real phenomenon for everybody, you will not have everyone committed to fighting the virus. And the people who are driving most of the spread are the people who are missing in action.
Public health strategies need to be dynamic. When regional lockdowns in Toronto and Peel failed to contain the spread, that was our first clue that closures would not be sufficient and that other changes were needed. There needs to be a stronger sense of urgency when our leaders discuss personal preventative measures. The tone needs to be one of foreboding and fear. Our government needs to start scaring people into submission because the next step is physically enforcing compliance, which is a place where nobody wants to go.