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Covid-19: How Worried Should We Be About The Disease, And Our All-Too American Government
Today, let’s take a quick break from the mountain of data and focus on the emotional response we’re having to the Covid-19 pandemic. This article will address the concerns people have about normal life and the changes to it that will potentially follow fairly rapidly during the next few weeks. The main question I’ll try to answer here is simple enough: How concerned should we be about the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19?
In the Media
Media reports being all over the place as they are, and the history of SARS and MERS being what they are, people seem to be conflicted about how concerned to be over the Covid-19 outbreak. The President of the United States has been doing everything in his power to downplay and/or trivialize the disease for months now, repeatedly calling it a hoax and insisting it will be gone shortly without intervention, as well as classifying discussions of the disease to slow the spread of information about it. Without getting into the (utter lack of) appropriateness of these remarks and deeds, we must understand that they have set the tone for the way a large portion of the nation approaches the disease, and we must acknowledge the threat as it exists with this undeniable breach of propriety mixed in: a lot of people in the United…
