Cartoon – Unmitigated Disaster Spin
Category Archives: Communication
What the U.S. can learn from other countries in the coronavirus fight
https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-lessons-other-countries-24794264-1653-4500-922c-7f1c66efa011.html
The countries that have most successfully fended off the novel coronavirus have mainly done it with a combination of new technology and old-school principles.
Why it matters: There’s a lot the U.S. can learn from the way other countries have handled this global pandemic — although we may not be able to apply those lessons as quickly as we’d like.
The big picture: A handful of Asian countries, including South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, have succeeded where the U.S. and Europe have failed.
- They were able to quickly bring the virus under control, reducing the number of new cases that cropped up each day. And they did it largely without shutting down schools, businesses and public life.
The bad news: It’s too late for the U.S. to simply do what worked in those countries. We’ve already made too many mistakes.
- But there are still lessons for the U.S. to learn for future outbreaks — and, hopefully, there are some pieces of those countries’ larger strategies that we can adapt to our coronavirus response now.
Lesson 1: The playbook works
As a new infection begins to spread, you want to quickly test the people who might have it, and quarantine the ones who do. Then you want to figure out who else they might have infected, and test those people, and quarantine the ones who are indeed sick. This process gets repeated.
- “If you don’t know what your population is that you’re supposed to be monitoring, you don’t have a chance,” said Claire Standley, an infectious-disease expert at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security.
This test-and-trace process is nothing new. It’s the standard playbook. South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan just executed it a lot better than the United States.
- Testing and contact tracing are particularly important with this strain of coronavirus because people can spread it before they start to feel sick — so if you’re only testing the sickest patients, the virus is still spreading unchecked.
- And it’s important to do this early. It’s a lot easier to stop five people from infecting another 15 than it is to stop 20,000 people from infecting another 60,000.
Next time a mysterious virus starts spreading abroad, better testing and a much faster response will be imperative.
Lesson 2: Technology can help
Singapore has gotten pretty draconian with its track-and-trace process.
- The government tracks the location of residents’ smartphones, so it knows exactly who had come within a few feet of an infected or potentially infected person.
- It uses the same location data to help enforce mandatory quarantines.
That might be too Big Brother for the U.S., but a voluntary version of it might work — we already consent to a whole lot of location tracking for much less important ends.
- And researchers are already using population-level smartphone data to see, for example, which cities are flouting stay-at-home orders. That can help inform local response even without individualized tracking.
- “I think we’re further along that pathway than maybe people think,” Standley said.
Taiwan, meanwhile, aided its coronavirus response by making better use of data it already had. It quickly merged its immigration and health care databases, giving authorities a real-time view of who was getting sick and where they had traveled.
- That might be hard to copy in the U.S., though, because the relevant data are scattered across multiple local, state and federal agencies with little to no integration. And we have no centralized health data.
Lesson 3: Messaging matters
Public communication is one of the big things Italy — a leading example of what not to do — got wrong.
- Some Italian officials downplayed the virus for too long. Leaders often contradicted each other, and sometimes themselves, about piecemeal interventions before finally locking down the entire country as cases skyrocketed.
Singapore, by contrast, came out early with a clear message: This was going to be bad for a while, and people needed to stick together and do their part.
The U.S., so far, looks a lot more like Italy.
- President Trump has sent similarly mixed messages here, initially downplaying the virus and saying it would go away on its own before changing his tone as cases mounted.
What’s next
The U.S. can’t go back in time to get things right at the beginning. So we can’t match the success of places like South Korea.
- Our best backup plan is to stick with aggressive social distancing and give our testing capacity more time to ramp up.
- We don’t seem to be on track to ever achieve the kind of sophisticated track-and-trace programs Asia employed, but hopefully some cruder version can help us find our way out of this if we keep the number of new cases low in the meantime.
The bottom line: “If we had got on top of this thing two months ago, America would look very, very different,” Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, said in a recent interview with the New Yorker.
The Recurring Themes of Disease Outbreaks
With news this weekend that the coronavirus is poised to become a global pandemic and that China covered up early evidence of its spread, I was pleased to see an article from Ashley Fuoco Antonelli of the Advisory Board’s Daily Briefing revisiting a four-year-old post of mine. Kristina Daugirdas (my wife) and I had just taught a class on global outbreaks, and we pulled together a list of recurring patterns.
Fuoco Antonelli goes through that list and carefully shows how each of them maps pretty well onto what we’ve seen so far with the coronavirus. Here’s a taste:
Bagley’s 2016 list features several recurring themes that center on governments’ responses to disease outbreaks. For instance, three themes that he highlighted are:
- “Governments are typically unprepared, disorganized, and resistant to taking steps necessary to contain infectious diseases, especially in their early phases”;
- “Public officials are reluctant to publicize infections for fear of devastating the economy”; and
- “Local, state, federal, and global governing bodies are apt to point fingers at one another over who’s responsible for taking action. Clear lines of authority are lacking.”
Each of those themes certainly holds true today. Media outlets have reported that China was slow to report the new coronavirus outbreak and implement measures to contain it. And some observers have questioned whether Chinese officials downplayed the outbreak’s severity.
For example, the New York Times‘s Li Yuan writes that, as the first cases of the virus emerged, officials “insisted that it was controlled and treatable,” and “the [Chinese] government took pains to keep up appearances.” For example, she notes, “[T]wo days before Wuhan told the world about the severity of the outbreak, it hosted a potluck banquet attended by more than 40,000 families so the city could apply for a world record for most dishes served at an event.”
Media reports also have highlighted complications and conflict between local and central officials in China regarding what information could be shared with the public. For instance, the Wall Street Journal‘s Josh Chin writes that Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang has cited rules set by leaders in Beijing for “limit[ing] what he could disclose about the threat posed by the pathogen.”
As I told Fuoco Antonelli, there’s a sense that we’ve seen this movie before, and history offers us resources for thinking about how this is likely to play out. That may explain why some of the best writing on the virus has come from historians of infectious disease—including in particular my colleague Howard Markel, who has criticized the Chinese authorities for their heavy-handed quarantine.
I wanted to close by flagging Ashish Jha’s recent post at the Health Affairs Blog. Ashish takes an early look at the American response and closes with a look toward the future:
Here is the bottom line: we need to be doing more. This outbreak, under the best of circumstances, is going to cost countries around the world tens of billions of U.S. dollars and American businesses possibly many billions more. Yet we spend a fraction of that each year on vaccine platforms, research on viruses, and capacity-building for rapid vaccine production. Firefighting is always more expensive than fire prevention. In a highly connected world, with climate change upon us, novel disease outbreaks that become global is the new normal.
Indeed, if history teaches us anything, it’s that outbreaks of novel infectious diseases have always been normal. Even so, we’re almost never ready. History teaches us that too.
Cartoon – Good Listener
Cartoon – Text Messaging
Cartoon – Importance of Collaboration
Most Important Thing in Communication
Cartoon – Importance of Communication Clarity
Cartoon – Good Communicator Surrounded by Terrible Ideas
Cartoon – It’s a New Idea
HENRY KOTULA 