In a recent article that was the cover for The Atlantic Magazine’s September cover story , Ed Yong details what he learned about America’s response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. In the lengthy article, Mr. Yong, who has been recognized for his excellent COVID-19 pandemic reporting tries to answer the question that should be on the front of the national conversation
How did the United States home to just 4 percent of the world’s population get to have nearly a quarter of the COVID-19 cases and deaths? A major source for the reporting Mr. Yong writes,
“Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable.”
The article sheds light on a number of areas that contributed to the consequential response
A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold.
Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread.
A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness.
Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19.
The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood.
The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.
Scott Alexander a psychiatrist author on the now -silent blog Slate Star Codex explores the role and use of experts in the unfolding COVID 19 pandemic.
But in terms of giant institutional failures that everyone is angry about, the face mask thing barely makes the top ten.
Let's get back to the media:
Their (the media)) main excuse is that they were just relaying expert opinion - the sort of things the WHO and CDC and top epidemiologists were saying. I believe them. People on Twitter howl and gnash their teeth at this, asking why the press didn't fact-check or challenge those experts. But I'm not sure I want to institute a custom of journalists challenging experts. Journalist Johann Hari decided to take it upon himself to challenge psychiatric experts, and wrote a serious of terrible articles and a terrible book saying they were wrong about everything. I am a psychiatrist and I can tell he is so wrong that it is physically painful to read his stuff. Most journalists stick to assuming the experts know more about their subject of expertise than they do, and I think this is wise. The role of science journalists is to primarily relay, explain, give context to the opinions of experts, not to try to out-medicine the doctors. So I think this is a good excuse.
But I would ask this of any journalist who pleads that they were just relaying and providing context for expert opinions: what was the experts' percent confidence in their position?
I am so serious about this. What fact could possibly be more relevant? What context could it possibly be more important to give? I'm not saying you need to have put a number in your articles, maybe your readers don't go for that. But were you working off of one? Did this question even occur to you?
But I would ask this of any journalist who pleads that they were just relaying and providing context for expert opinions: what was the experts' percent confidence in their position?