COVID-19 is not cinematic
I had a friend who said of New York this spring, how bad could COVID be when people are not lined up outside of hospitals banging on doors trying to get in? He expected this for something “really bad,” and it made me consider how skeptics might be processing what they see.
Before COVID-19, the only touchstone for pandemics in America were movies like Outbreak or Contagion. People die right away, often in public, and in great numbers. Scripts require rapid demise, with only two hours for three acts, so it is spit up blood, then die a quick, certain death. A weeks-long ICU passing does not move a plot and most people survive COVID-19, many without symptoms at all. COVID-19 is a very un-cinematic disease.
So hospitals are not outward scenes of chaos. Bodies are not stacked like cord wood. How bad can it be? While Trump’s campaign against COVID safety had many parts, Hollywood’s pandemic imagery has been, unfortunately, an asset for the right-wing minimizing the real one today. COVID-19 does not fit the script many people expect and that is a problem for public perception of the pandemic.
COVID-19 is hidden from daily view
COVID-19 is visible only to those suffering through it. Get infected, stay home in quarantine. Get really sick, take an ambulance to the hospital. Die, go out a back door to a non-descript morgue truck. Perceiving COVID’s threat takes abstract thinking because naive expectations, based on daily life and from movies, tells many not wearing masks or going to wedding receptions is an acceptable risk because the situation does not seem that bad.
The problem is how to make the hidden suffering and cost clearly visible to those less inclined to understand, so they will take the steps needed to prevent COVID’s spread.
Make COVID-19 visible and compelling everywhere
We need to make people aware of the disease. As ridiculous as that sounds, with school closings and bar curfews, people need to see signs in everyday life of the COVID around them to understand. Show, in concrete terms, COVID is here, in your town, around the corner in your neighborhood. Yard signs saying “father died of COVID-19” or “grandma died after family gathering” would make the suffering that much more visible. Hospitals displaying COVID death count billboards outside. Fire stations signs counting COVID ambulance trips made. Bumper stickers saying Covid Longhauler. Every family who lost a loved one keeping an empty chair outside for all to see.
Efforts like this will not change the hardened COVID partisan, but may well turn those who deny the risks for other reasons. Making the disease visible will make it real, over time, to those who do not truly understand.