Why It's So Hard to Follow the Pandemic

One of the local Facebook groups has had a long and extremely vocal discussion about the pandemic that's brought out some rather disturbing opinions. I'm reminded of the adage: "Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one." I'm used to ignorance when it comes to scientific subjects, but it's disturbing to see racism, misogyny, and conspiracy theories bubbling up among posts about lost dogs and where's the best place to get your winter tires changed.

I suggested that people take some time out and read this article (yes, another one from The Atlantic, which is doing a superb job of following the pandemic). It's long (7,000 words or so), but it's a complex subject. 

But much else about the pandemic is still maddeningly unclear. Why do some people get really sick, but others do not? Are the models too optimistic or too pessimistic? Exactly how transmissible and deadly is the virus? How many people have actually been infected? How long must social restrictions go on for? Why are so many questions still unanswered?

The confusion partly arises from the pandemic’s scale and pace. Worldwide, at least 3.1 million people have been infected in less than four months. Economies have nose-dived. Societies have paused. In most people’s living memory, no crisis has caused so much upheaval so broadly and so quickly. “We’ve never faced a pandemic like this before, so we don’t know what is likely to happen or what would have happened,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “That makes it even more difficult in terms of the uncertainty.”

But beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues to be so befuddling—a slew of forces scientific and societal, epidemiological and epistemological. What follows is an analysis of those forces, and a guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend.