Thread by @MariaGlymour

Plenary at #SER2022 with @zeynep re aspects of human behavior that were not adequately incorporated into pandemic response. This is a very dense talk w/o slides so livetweet is a bit bumpy... but talk was super interesting so I did my best.

For example, because of stigma, it doesn't make sense/isn't possible to have effective rules that only sick people wear masks.

Idea that masking or testing would make people 'reckless' just didn't make any sense and inconsistent w/ prior research.

Informing people is always better. Efforts to 'guide' people's behavior by withholding information or withholding resources decay trust and undermine public health efforts overall.

Argues that apparently child vaccine approval has been delayed in order not to 'undermine confidence' or 'confuse' people - nothing could be more confusing or undermine confidence more than failing to prioritize getting vax to kids.

Why did we ban outdoor activities? People need to get together at some point - need to give people accurate info about safer vs riskier activities- instead of expecting people not to do any activities.

Response to incomplete vaccination rates by lumping all unvaxed people as 'anti-vax' instead of recognizing major barriers in trust and access to accurate information also has delayed vaccine takeup.

Instead we got a social media environment that feeds caricatures (and you can always find an example that matches the caricature) instead of trying to understand where is the public health approach here?

Of everything we screwed up in the pandemic, very little comes back to not having the right tools. We technically had good tools pretty early, e.g., vax, rapid tests. Problems come from not taking into account the sociology of the situation.

Prior research actually suggests authorities in times of crisis often fall back on Hobbesian attitudes not trusting the public and implementing rules that backfire.

[I've lost the thread here re aerosols and airborne transmission]