Thread by @drvolts

Random thread that's been on my mind for a while, about public health communication.

Lots has been said about how official authorities communicated/are communicating about Covid. I think it's pretty widely agreed that it's been a mess -- complicated, shifting, uncertain, etc.

IMO, the very most important thing in communicating health stuff to the public is *clarity*. Messages should be simple, easy to remember, easy to repeat. And to some extent, this should also be true of the public health response itself.

From the beginning, Covid communication was the opposite. Not only bad info, but excessively complicated info & excessively complicated recommendations: you're X% at risk if you're this age, in a room this size, with ventilation this good. Wear masks here but not here, etc.

All this nuance, however well-intended, basically ensured that everyone would be confused, different people would freestyle their own responses, & there would be maximal social tension over all of it, which sure enough, there was.

My thought was always that, from the very beginning, authorities should have imposed clarity, even at the risk of, uh, over-protecting some people. Don't try to "optimize" the response; accept that big, dumb, directionally correct response is the best outcome available.

To wit, in March 2020, the message should have been: "Covid has exceeded X% of the population, so we're all going to wear masks, any time we're indoors or in crowded outdoor spaces. We're all going to do this until the rate of Covid falls back below X%."

This offers people two things: one, the cognitive load of "whether to wear a mask" is gone. Everybody's supposed to wear it. And two, there's a clear metric for when masks can come off, a clear target we can all see, understand, & pursue together.

One thing progs always misunderstand about the authoritarian (& authoritarian-lite) personalities on the right: they appreciate authority! They respond to force, to orders. Ambiguity makes them *more* anxious & angry & resistant than simple, clear commands.

The pursuit of a common, transparent metric would also have marshaled more social pressure against anti-vaxxers. "We can't take our masks off until they get their shit together." That's much clearer & more intuitive than the kind of begging & pleading now going on.

Anyway, I'm just some schmo, but in retrospect, that's what I think could have worked: we all put on masks together, at once, and we all take them off together, at once, when we hit our goal. No need for all these cognitively & emotionally draining individual calculations.