Granted, medical science may sometimes mistakes. But medical science still makes many, many fewer mistakes than do politicians appearing on TV and pretending to be doctors, touting unproven anecdotal remedies.  Alternative facts, half truths, and dangerous nonsense are readily projected onto the unknown.

The management and overcoming of a pandemic is difficult under the best of circumstances. Along with deep medical and public health expertise, it requires leadership, communication, and political skills. Not for the faint of heart.

A single fact is worth a thousand opinions. Here is a fact from Emily Landon, MD, Executive Director Infection Prevention and Control, University of Chicago Medical Center (for the complete text see the URL at the end of this post):

“Two cities in America made different choices [in 1918] about how to proceed and when only a few patients were affected. St. Louis shut itself down and sheltered in place. But Philadelphia went ahead with a huge parade to celebrate those going off to war.

“A week later, Philadelphia hospitals were overrun. And thousands were dead, many more than in St. Louis. This is a cautionary tale for our time. Things are already tough in Illinois hospitals, including mine. There is no vaccine or readily available antiviral to help stem the tide.

“Our health care system doesn’t have any slack. There are no empty wards waiting for patients or nurses waiting in the wings. We barely even have enough masks for the nurses that we have. Looking back to the last time, we were–limited tools and having a dangerous infection spread quickly was the beginning of the 1918 pandemic.

“All we have to slow the spread is social distance. And if we let every single patient with this infection infect three more people and then each of them infect two or three more people, there won’t be a hospital bed when my mother can’t breathe very well or when yours is coughing too much.”

[March 20, 2020: https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/emily-landon-speaks-about-covid-19-at-illinois-governors-press-conference ]

The genie seems to be out of the bottle (in this case, not a friendly genie) and to get it back in we need to “shelter in place” and stay home except for necessary trips for groceries, medicine, elder care, nuclear plant maintenance, and a small set of related activities.

Psychologically the most anxiety and fear inspiring thing is the unknown – that one can be infected without realizing it, and, thus, spread the infection without realizing it.

The lesson? My behavior affects you and your behavior affects me. We are all related in community. That’s the empathic moment.

Relatedness creates responsibilities to conduct ourselves in such ways as not to harm others. A lot of innocent activities – going to a restaurant, the theatre, a sporting event, playing cards (?!) – that involve congregating in groups seem less innocent this week than they did last week.

Yet another anxiety-inspiring unknown is that we do not know when we will be engaging in these activities again, though we surely will be doing so. I feel like the little kid who fifteen minutes into a three-day road trip to Florida starts asking, “Are we there yet?” The matter is serious, but we also need to enjoy a lighter moment. Chill, dude!

I am going to keep it short today; and for the to-be-determined weeks ahead – follow Dr Landon’s guidance – follow doctor’s orders – stay home.

See the complete blog post of which this is an update: Empathy in the age of the coronavirus: https://wp.me/pXkOk-aq

Notes

I acknowledge the title of Jeffry Pfeffer and Robert Sutton’s excellent business book, not directly related to this post, which I own and enjoyed reading, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management (2006).

Also relevant is a first hand account of the symptoms (March 27, 2020) [once again, not for the faint of heart]:

(c) Lou Agosta, PhD, and the Chicago Empathy Project