Pandemic apathy

An article in Vox yesterday by Kelsey Piper notes that after suffering through the whole Covid pandemic, policymakers and publics now seem remarkably unconcerned to prevent another one. ‘Repeated efforts to get a serious pandemic prevention program through [the US] Congress’, she writes, ‘have fizzled.’ Writing from Britain, I’m not aware of more serious efforts to prevent a repetition over here.

That seems surprising. Both governments and citizens notoriously neglect many catastrophic threats, sometimes because they’ve never yet materialised (thermonuclear war; misaligned superintelligence), sometimes because they creep up on us slowly (climate change, biodiversity loss), sometimes because it’s been a while since the last disaster and memories fade. After an earthquake or a hundred-year flood, more people take out insurance against them; over time, memories fade and take-up declines.

None of these mechanisms plausibly explains apathy toward pandemic risk. If anything, you’d think people would exaggerate the threat, as they did the threat of terrorism after 9/11. It’s recent and—in contrast to 9/11—it’s something we all personally experienced.

What’s going on? Cass Sunstein argues that 9/11 prompted a stronger response than global heating in part because people could put a face on a specific villain—Osama bin Laden. Sunstein maintains that this heightens not only outrage but also fear. Covid is like global heating rather than al-Qaeda in this respect.

While that could be part of it, my hunch is that at least two other factors are playing a role. First, tracking down and killing terrorists was exciting. Improving ventilation systems or monitoring disease transmission between farmworkers and cows is not. It’s a bit like trying to get six-year olds interested in patent infringements. This prompts the worry that we might fail to address some threats because their solutions are too boring to think about.

Second, maybe Covid is a bit like Brexit. That issue dominated British politics for so long that even those of us who would like to see Britain rejoin the EU are rather loth to reopen it. Similarly, most of us would rather think about anything else than the pandemic. Unfortunately, that’s a recipe for repeating it.