'Scientists have known for months that 'all or nothing' was a misleading way to approach the question of how to combat the spread of the disease'
London, ca. 1918. Photo: Vintage_Space / Alamy/Alamy Stock Photo Almost as soon as the first marches to protest the killing of George Floyd began, in Minneapolis on May 26, conservatives and COVID contrarians seized on the rallies as a case study of liberal coronavirus hypocrisy.
But all the way up through the beginning of the protests, and even after, America’s jury-rigged, Rube Goldberg health-messaging apparatus failed to communicate most of these nuances — suggesting, for instance, that Georgia’s reopening was a “death sentence,” and that its governor, Brian Kemp, had “blood on his hands,” rather than emphasizing relative risks and the precautions that might be taken to avoid them.
In January, as the earliest scary research into the outbreak in Wuhan began arriving from China, public-health officials downplayed the threat and systematically advised coronavirus panic be channeled into vigilance about the flu, which they considered a bigger problem.
As Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer wrote recently in The Atlantic, the country seems now to be giving up on defeating the disease, after what their colleague Derek Thompson has described as an across-the-board, country-wide failure of institutions. Many of these choices have been political, of course — partisanship getting in the way of any honest reckoning with the state of the science.
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