Why You Should Not Check the Coronavirus Numbers Daily
The numbers do not lie, but they can cause great misconceptions.
The novel coronavirus outbreak has gripped our attention ever since it blew up at the start of the year in China. It may have felt like a remote, abstract problem in the beginning, but the rapidly changing situation has proven that feeling utterly wrong. In the midst of a now global CoViD-19 pandemic, our interest around it has naturally peaked so it is only expected for us to want to check on updates on the local, national and international situation all the time.
We can be experiencing everything from mild but uncomfortable anxiety to outright panic seeing everything unfold so fast and with so much uncertainty around this new pathogen. In any case, watching the news on tv, following news updates on social media or even checking on live counters for new cases and deaths around the world feels like a necessity. However logical it may seem to constantly check the headlines and the numbers though, I would advise avoiding that for a number of reasons.
The first one is that checking daily (or even hourly) numbers doesn’t give us real, useful information. They may in fact mislead us, as numbers often do when presented in specific ways or without context. This is in part due to all the media across the board wanting to present sensational news that grab our attention, rather than accurate, complex stories.
A title like “30 more deaths from coronavirus in the US this week!” will draw many more readers than “Coronavirus continues to spread in the US”. The second title hints to a more complex situation that requires further reading to get the details, while the first focuses only on the number with the highest shock-value. This is nothing new of course, but in a complex and rapidly-evolving situation like the coronavirus pandemic, such freeze-frames have little to no information-value.
Furthermore, a set of special complexities in the CoViD-19 pandemic make isolated numbers even more unreliable. The main one being the limited availability of testing in different parts of the world. Having a new virus blow up so fast, most governments haven’t had the capacity to provide enough coronavirus testing-kits to be able to screen everyone with suspicious symptoms or a risky travel-history. And there are now many asymptomatic or barely symptomatic people who have never left their cities.
A note here: No, being able to hold your breath for 10 seconds is NOT proof that you do not have the coronavirus, exactly because you can have (and possibly transmit) the virus without ANY symptoms.
Some governments have done better than others at this department, but this inevitably means that we cannot have a reliable picture of how many people are infected at any given time. Additionally, as testing becomes more available, the numbers of new cases will spike here and there in various countries without reflecting any real increase of the virus spreading, whereas in other countries we will see few new cases, only because of limited testing (see for example most African countries). This affects also the mortality rate of the virus (i.e. how deadly we think it is), which will be revised numerous times until this pandemic ends.
There is of course our very human need to feed on simple, straightforward information, especially in the midst of a pandemic like this. We need to know what is going on and to that end we prefer bite-sized, easily digestible bits rather than complex, multi-sided narratives. The age of social media has inadvertently contributed to our short attention span in everyday life and in a crisis like this it naturally becomes even shorter. A sense of urgency permeates everything we do and clouds our judgement, as well as our logical and long-term planing.
The same urgency makes people buy toilet paper and pasta in bulk, leading to empty shelves at the supermarkets already. Isn’t it absurd?
I therefore urge all of us, including myself, to be mindful of these tendencies our minds have and to do our best to avoid feeding on largely meaningless numbers and statistics in such a rapidly evolving situation.
To go a step further, I would say getting your information by headlines and breaking news clips in the first place is a bad idea. In the chaos of constant news media updates it is very easy to take bad, sloppy or even false information at face value. The CoViD-19 pandemic is the perfect fertile ground for rampant misinformation, generated partly by people prioritizing clicks over logic and truth and partly by people wanting to exploit our panic and confusion to make money.
Anything from silver to vitamin-C has been peddled as a magical cure for coronavirus and sadly gained traction. I do not even need to explain why such claims are ridiculous, I hope.
Yet in the frenzy of the news cycle and the avalanche of social media news feeds, it can be hard to distinguish fact from fiction. I would therefore recommend steering clear of the cheap, attention-seeking headlines altogether and focus on the information being put out by reliable sources, like the ECDC, the WHO and our governments. If you are really feeling up to it, try going through The Lancet’s CoViD-19 resource center to get some reliable scientific updates.
I know it may feel reasonable to doubt everything these official sources say and try to find “the truth” behind it. Because they sure don’t have all the (right) answers for this pandemic. No one does. But in such a large-scale crisis, our best chance of getting through it with minimum losses and damages, primarily in human lives, is to coordinate and follow a coherent strategy. Otherwise any attempts humanity makes to handle this will be pointless.
The best we can do individually is (as we are constantly advised) to avoid unnecessary social contacts, especially with elders, wash our hands frequently and thoroughly (20 seconds = 2 happy birthdays), avoid touching our faces with our hands and quarantine ourselves if we get sick.
What we can also do, among many other options, is go out and have a walk in the fresh air, as long as we avoid crowed places, no one is advising against that. Staying home 24/7 can drive us crazy. And that is exactly what we don’t need right now. Our best bet is to stay alert and cautious but calm.