The Media and Pandemics

I was having a discussion today about whether coronavirus has caused the media to take up scaremongering. My personal opinion is that the media are not scaremongering, they are just really excited. And excited people tend to over exaggerates and be, well, excitable. This is a journalist's or a news organisation's dream come true. This is what they live for.

So I don't think that news organisations are cynically scaremongering, although some of their claims may be inaccurate's or hyperbolic. I tend to err on the side of the charity for them because this is how everyone I speak to on a daily basis is reacting. There is a coextensive relationship between media organisations and people whereby people talk about it because it's on the news and the news racks up their reporting because they know people are talking about it, and so on. I talked about this in my piece "Do We Drive the Media or Does the Media Drive Us?". The same can be said for the international governmental reaction to the coronavirus.

The question is, is this "excitement" and overreaction concerning coronavirus, causing more damage than benefit? Here's my view on this.

We may well see an "unnecessary" expenditure on coronavirus whereby we are spending billions of dollars tackling it whilst there is a massive cost to various industries and sectors that could send us into recession. I see this another way: this is our dry run. I would much rather we overreacted and overspent on coronavirus, and it being unwarranted because it wasn't, in reality, that much of a threat; I would rather we did this and have really good experience of dealing with pandemics, so that next time, when properly dangerous pandemic came around, we would have the experience and know-how of how to deal with it. After all, we will get another pandemic: this is a certainty.

I would much rather be fully prepared so that when a "proper" pandemic came around, we would just follow protocol that we had developed during this dry run.

It's a bit like Pascal's Wager. We might as well spend this much money because a) coronavirus might well be the virus the media are telling us it is or b) it is not the virus they are telling us it is, but we are spending money on preparing ourselves well for when we really are hit by such a virus.

But, yes, we will have to wait to see whether that expenditure and the cost to our economy is worth it if this is indeed a flash in the pan. Then again, it is really difficult to measure the success of something when something doesn't happen. If I spend £1000 putting CCTV on my property as a deterrent to burglars, it is hard to know if that expenditure was worth it if I can't tell whether I have actually deterred any burglars. My life might continue as normal for a year and I could think I had wasted £1000 without knowing that it had actually deterred three burglars who ended up not burgling my property. We might spend an awful lot of money containing this virus and the virus amounting to relatively little and we might think that we have wasted our money. But it is hard to tell whether, if we hadn't spent that money, whether it would have had much greater, more far-reaching effects with greater cost to human life and our economy, etc.

I guess we'll see. Let's hope this really is a flash in a pan and amounts to relatively little!