Quote:
Originally Posted by Flylady
Some people contribute facts with references and others provide statements without context or research."
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This was the main point of my original post. Uninformed tribal loyalty is what's going to kill us. People won't give up tribal loyalty even when their life is under direct threat. It's more important for them to win an argument and save face than to stay alive.
You can only protect yourself during a pandemic (war, natural disaster, etc.) by having the facts so you can make intelligent decisions. What is the extent of the current threat? Am I safe where I am? Is it safe to go outside? Would I be safer in another state or country? Is the threat currently increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? What do the experts predict is going to happen? What facts do they base their predictions on? What are they advising us to do?
My personal beliefs are far less useful for saving me right now than fact-based expert opinions. There is some divergence among experts, but it's not huge. There is more or less unanimous agreement that the COVID-19 crisis isn't going to be over in the next two weeks, that it's going to last many more weeks or months, that there's a good chance that it will return next season, and that it's unlikely that a vaccine will be ready in time for the next season.
In all the articles I've read that were written by experts (epidemiologists, doctors) or that quoted experts, none has ever mentioned their political affiliation. This is not about winning a political argument; it's about survival. Whether I'm a Democrat or Republican, I want to survive. For that we need the facts and expert opinions based on them.
We have no choice but to rely on experts, especially those who have closely studied the evolution of COVID-19 in other countries and can draw lessons from those countries, such as how China was able to significantly slow the spread of the virus and why Italy is on a disastrous course. There is no need to put blind trust in the experts if that makes you uncomfortable---the facts that they base their predictions and recommendations on are available online. You can either read the original scientific studies directly, or you can read summaries of them in trustworthy apolitical sources. Here's an article that explains the mathematics behind social distancing, for example:
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/15/211803...ial-distancing
The question is whether people want to know the facts and whether they can understand them and make rational decisions based on them. None of those is a given. When this crisis is over it will be seen that ultimately it was human psychological tendencies that turned COVID-19 into a pandemic---the tendency to think that disasters happen to other people or other countries, the tendency to procrastinate, to hold onto beliefs that make us feel better or look better, deliberately concealing information for political reasons (China), our unwillingness to consider positions contrary to our own, and so on.
I'll gladly lose the political argument if it means I'm more likely to survive. Politicizing a virus is foolhardy.