I have been mumbling to myself for few weeks already, and today I thought that I might as well write it down. It is not the first time that I oscillate between believing that most journalists are ignorants (which would be ok) or being convinced that they are trying to safeguard our security (which is quite scary).
What I wonder about is why don´t we see headlines saying that Omicron was predictable, and that the pandemic is going away?
It is actually not so hard to understand. If a virus is very lethal, it infects a person, who dies. People don’t touch corpses that much, and eventually corpses are buried or destroyed. So mutations that increase the lethality of a virus do not spread that much. Mutations that decrease the lethality of a virus, on the other side, do spread. If a virus that does not kill you right away infects you, you will putter alive and sick, infecting more people. So, along time, a virus tends to become less and less lethal, and more and more contagious. Just like the flu, which back in 1917 killed millions, and nowadays don’t. Or just like COVID19 and the variant Omicron: way more contagious and less lethal than previous ones.
Any evolutionary biologist could have predicted the rise of Omicron, then.
Now, if you read the news of the last weeks with this piece of information in mind, you will actually read that plenty of people is saying that Omicron is, actually, good news. But the headlines and the framing of the news is different. Why would that be?
Of course, it could be that whoever is writing the news can’t understand why any scientist would say, in the middle of a pandemic, that actually Omicron is not that bad. The journalist will hear that, not understand it, and frame it with the context that he or she does understand: Reporting on such statement, the context given will be still negative.
The other hypothesis is that actually all journalist understand this very well, or as well as any other biologist. But they also understand that a virus that seriously disrupts the health of a person, and that is highly contagious, will still wreak avoc in the hospitals and social services of any nation. It will kill less people… but in the long run it might kill more people that do not get to be treated in time for whatever they have, because the hospitals are actually full. Journalists might also understand that in our current crazy world, people alive in 2021 is as bananas as people alive at the high of the black pest, and believe nothing rational. So any hint of good news will, as it has done in NL, increase contagion-prone behaviour. So in this case, journalists are like “sure sure, good news. But let’s not tell them. Let’s nanny them a bit more, so they don’t go more bananas”.
So I wonder. What do you prefer? stupid journalists or nanny journalists?