by futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A.
“If you hold a cat by the tail, you will learn things you cannot learn any other way.”
– Mark Twain
“Mommy! Make it didn’t happen!”
– Little kids and immature adults everywhere
The Covid-19 pandemic has created what amounts to a global intelligence test. And most people are failing.
For decades, the forces that oppose science and considered thought have been growing. The most notable examples of some of the zombie ideas[1] they’ve produced include:
- The denial of evolution and the embrace of creationism or intelligent design;
- The denial that climate is changing, and that humanity is at least a major contributing factor in forcing that change; and
- The belief that vaccines are dangerous, or are a conspiracy by drug companies to poison people, especially children.
Now we have to add to this list the rather vague anti-Covid meme, which goes something like:
“This whole virus thing is a hoax. And if it’s not a hoax, then it’s bullshit. Or if it’s not bullshit, it’s no worse than a cold or the flu. And if it is worse than the flu, then it’s going to miraculously go away. And if it’s not going to miraculously go away, it’s no big deal; after all, people are going to die anyway from gunshot wounds, car accidents, or something else. And besides, this is the only way we can build herd immunity (whatever that is). And even if it doesn’t build herd immunity, more people will die of starvation if they can’t earn any money, so we have to open the economy right now. It might cost us some old folks, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. Besides, I don’t know anyone who’s gotten it, and the numbers look OK to me.”
All of these Covid comments are rationalizations, and stop just short of “mommy, make it didn’t happen.”
This is not to say that there isn’t real economic and financial pain. There absolutely is, there are many desperate people who have run out of money. And there are many businesses that are at, or past, the point of bankruptcy, and know that if they don’t re-open very soon, they never will. All of that is true.
Yet, to repeat something that public health officials all over the world have said, the virus doesn’t care.
So, that’s why I say that the pandemic has created a global intelligence test, not only for individuals, but for communities, regions, nations, societies, and humanity as a whole. Are we, individually and collectively, smart enough to get through this pandemic without gruesome numbers of deaths and disabilities, and without cratering our economies? The answer, in the profound words of the Magic 8-Ball, is: “Outlook cloudy. Ask again later.”
Is There a Right Answer?
If you look around the world, you see that different nations have come up with different answers to the pandemic’s challenge. That makes it possible to say that, based on what we know so far, there are right and wrong answers by nations to the Covid IQ-test.
Let’s start with the countries that have found the right answers, based on what we know as of Wednesday, May 27th, 2020: [2]
| Country | Population | Confirmed Cases | Deaths |
| Vietnam | 97 million | 327 | 0 |
| Taiwan | 24 million | 441 | 7 |
| South Korea | 51 million | 11,265 | 269 |
| Germany | 83 million | 181,524 | 8,428 |
Each of these countries either have, or are in the process of, re-opening their economies, and have taken far less economic damage than most other countries.
There are also countries that have come up with the wrong answers: [3]
| Country | Population | Confirmed Cases | Deaths |
| United Kingdom | 68 million | 268,616 | 37,542 |
| Russia | 146 million | 370,680 | 3,968 |
| Brazil | 213 million | 291,222 | 24,512 |
| United States | 331million | 1,694,599 | 99,983 |
To do a a best-to-worst comparison, if the U.S. had handled the virus as well as Germany has, it would have had about 57% fewer cases, and about one-third as many deaths as it has.
I won’t compare Vietnam with the U.S. because they are two very different countries, but clearly the U.S. would come off very badly.
There Are Answers that Are Clearly Wrong
Consider the meatpacking industry, especially in the U.S. As you may be aware, the Covid virus has tended to cluster in three particular kinds of places: retirement or long-term care facilities; prisons; and meatpacking plants.
These three kinds of operations have large numbers of people who are in constant, close proximity, plus people who visited or worked there and then left and went into the community. Such conditions are ideal for the transmission of the virus, plus all three are typically out of the public eye and don’t get much political attention. As such, they tend not to be proactive about problems, and may even skirt safety rules they are supposed to follow.
Let’s focus on meatpacking plants because they have the clearest profit motive, being completely in the private sector. There are both for-profit and non-profit long-term care facilities, and both government run and for-profit prisons in America.
Suppose you are the owner of a meatpacking plant, and you truly didn’t give a flying fig about what happens to your workers, but you absolutely care what happens to your profits. Faced with the problems the pandemic has created, what would be the best strategy to follow to ensure the highest sustainable profits?
Well, clearly, you would need to make sure your workers kept working as much as possible, and that they would continue to do so. For that to happen, you would have to take prompt action to stamp out any outbreaks of the infection, institute strong preventative measures to make sure that the virus did not find new entries into your plants, and make sure your employees were safe themselves, and not infectious to others.
That is the only way you could be sure that your workers would be able to keep your plants operating, not just this month, but through the months ahead, until some kind of cure, vaccine, or effective treatment was available.
And surely that’s what the companies that own meatpacking plants have done, right?
Nope.
Instead they seem to have done just about everything imaginable wrong. It would seem as if they are trying to keep short-term profits as high as possible – even though it guarantees that future profits will crater.
Tellingly, it also seems as if most meatpacking plants are doing everything they can to keep the mismanagement of their plants a secret, even from local health authorities. Many of them have stopped reporting confirmed or suspected cases, refused to do testing, and are hiding the number of workers affected, even though such information is vital to public health authorities in managing the outbreak of the virus in their communities. As The New York Times website put it on 26 May 2020:
“The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at least 4,900 meat and poultry processing workers had been infected across 19 states, and at least 20 had died. Though outbreaks have been reported in every region of the country, the rural Midwest and South have been especially hard hit.
“Some companies, including Smithfield, have refused to answer even basic questions about the size of their outbreaks. And in some places, state and local health officials have also been silent.” [4]
And has this obdurate secrecy and refusal to take adequate steps to protect their means of production, the workers, helped their operations? Unsurprisingly, it has not:
“Across the country, production at meatpacking plants and other food processing centers has slowed or stopped because of large outbreaks, including one at a Smithfield facility in South Dakota that sickened more than 1,000 people and three at Tyson facilities in Iowa that sickened hundreds of people.” [5]
Clearly, these publicly traded companies are failing the Covid intelligence test.
Getting the Risks Wrong
Humans are not very good at assessing risks, tending to think about them emotionally rather than rationally, and the Covid pandemic brings that out very strongly. As one young man, interviewed on a crowded beach, put it, “I don’t worry about it. If you’re worried about it, stay home.” Clearly, he felt that other people might be taking risks, not he.
In a recent article, Dr. David Roberts, the former science advisor to the American Ambassador to Japan during the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in 2011, assessed the Covid risk in quantitative, rather than emotive, terms. Some of the comparisons are quite intriguing.
If you live in Maryland, for instance, you have been experiencing a pandemic risk equivalent to doing one skydiving jump per day. If you lived in New York City during the worst of its outbreak, you experienced twice the risk of a soldier in Afghanistan in 2010 – a particularly deadly year. And if you actually come down with the virus, no matter where you are, then your risk is roughly equivalent to what you would experience by climbing one of the highest peaks of the Himalayas, like Everest or K2.
Humans Are Bad at These Kinds of Problems
Humans are not good at problems that require patience, research, careful planning, and persistence. And the Covid pandemic is precisely this kind of problem: it requires us to be careful and patient for extended periods of time, even when it hurts us financially, economically, and emotionally to do so. It also requires us to listen to people who know more than we do, and suppress our desire to look smarter than we are.
You can see this failure in any number of different places, including:
- Donald Trump’s inability to come to grips with what is expected of him as President of the United States during a time of crisis, and his refusal to defer to people who know more about epidemiology than he does.
For a time, he thought he would garner good publicity by being a “wartime president” and appearing to supervise the activity against the pandemic. But when results didn’t come quickly, and when he made several embarrassing gaffs, particularly the one about injecting bleach, he tired of the charade Instead, he decided he wanted to focus on restarting the economy, and to hell with the consequences.
This is a classic – perhaps the textbook – example of humans not having the patience and persistence needed for certain kinds of problems. - Boris Johnson’s unwillingness to listen to Britain’s medical experts in the early days of the pandemic by assuming that developing herd immunity would be the way to deal with it before he was told (a) how many people that would kill, and (b) that he could, and did, contract the disease himself. Prior to contracting the virus, he made a show of going around and shaking as many hands as possible – deliberately inviting infection.
- Those Americans who chose to ignore the warnings of public health officials over the Memorial Day Weekend, and crowded together in bars, swimming pools, on beaches, and other public places. They think they know the risks, both to themselves and to others, but either discount them (“I’m young, it won’t get me”), or decide they don’t care (“What the hell – and besides, I’m tired of staying at home”). Either way, they are misestimating the risk to themselves and others, and the financial and emotional consequences to everyone.
- Elected leaders going against the advice of their public health advisors to open up when they know (or have been told) that it will lead to a resurgence in cases. This has happened in numerous U.S. states, such as Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and in the province of Quebec, among other jurisdictions.
Who Keeps Score On This Global IQ-Test?
The virus rewards those jurisdictions that make use of the best scientific knowledge, act on the advice of those who know the most about it, and are patient in waiting to make sure things are safe before opening up. These jurisdictions will come out ahead, both in terms of human lives saved, in terms of the emotional cost to everyone involved, and in financial and economic results. Indeed, doing better on managing the virus appears to be translating directly into less emotional, economic, and financial pain.
Smarter is richer.
So, think about the community where you live, and what is happening with the pandemic there, with your family, in your town or city, region, state, or province, and in the country where you live.
How is your part of the world doing on the global IQ-test? And will you, personally, pass, or fail?
For remember that failure may mean death to you or someone in your family, and will certainly mean death to people in your community, as well as economic and financial pain for everyone in your community.
[1] From economist Paul Krugman, who defines them as ideas that have been disproven multiple times, but refuse to die, and get resurrected repeatedly because they serve an emotional or political purpose as a convenient meme. See, for instance: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/zombie-ideas
[2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html, 27 May 2020
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
