How real is the danger?

Like it or not, we are currently locked into the same trajectory for dealing with the COVID-19 crisis — social distancing. At the end of it, there awaits one of two equally unfortunate, yet discernible, outcomes: one in which we lose a lot of people to the pandemic and emerge to a severely damaged economy, the other in which we lose relatively few people in the pandemic and emerge to a severely damaged economy with a lot of questions as to why. Neither is great.

In this country, we are in the process of spending $2 trillion to compensate for social distancing.

Two trillion dollars of borrowed money. At some point, we have to have a plan for paying for all of it. If there's one floating around out there, I haven't yet heard about it.

Most of the media, who are supposed to be neutral communicators of news events, have decided to become cheerleaders for social distancing. That's OK, but the other part of that is that they've also become actively engaged in shouting down dissent. There's good reason to question social distancing because it's being informed by tenuous data and driven by panic. That's lost on the media who seem intent on focusing on the worst possible medical outcomes.

A good example of media shaming was an article that appeared in the Washington Post a few days ago: “Smartphone data reveal which Americans are social distancing (and not) — D.C. gets an 'A' while Wyoming earns an 'F' for following coronavirus stay-at-home advice, based on the locations of tens of millions of phones.”

What I find interesting about this is the fact that the Washington Post has run tech columns bemoaning the privacy that Americans sacrifice through location sharing on their cellphones — even offering advice on how to stop it. If this same technique had been used to provide data for some cause with which they disagreed, I'm sure they'd be calling it down with boldface headlines and large fonts. It must be an “ends justifies the means” kind of deal.

Plus it was also a lousy analysis. Wyoming has been practicing social distancing as a way of life for 130 years. When you have to drive 40 miles for a gallon of milk, your cellphone is going to show more movement away from home.

I don't know what we should be doing about the COVID-19 pandemic. I just don't. There's not enough reliable data right now to support any conclusion I feel good about — in terms of clarity. To me, that suggests caution.

Though all of the likely outcomes to this crisis are less than great, some outcomes are less great than others. I'm not seeing a lot of interest in sorting all of this out. What I do see are all of the bright red flashing warning signs that indicate that reason is not at the other end of a lot of this. That's a dangerous place to be.

So how did we get here? That's pretty easy. Humans are, on average, terrible at assessing risk.

It's very common to find individuals who have a great fear of flying but no concern about driving cars — the latter an activity that involves orders of magnitude more risk.

In motorcycle road racing, I used to marvel at the course workers (really good folks, by the way) who would swear up and down that you'd never catch them out there in a race while chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Motorcycle road racing happens to be way safer than you might think. Smoking is not.

I used to occasionally have to motivate anxious climbing partners, via a blast of invective, who were paralyzed over the long distance to the ground below when the real danger was the gigantic cornice above that was going to land on our heads if we didn't move our butts.

I recognize that a couple of these examples are anecdotal, but there is an abundance of research that supports the point of view that most humans are poor at assessing personal risk. Now being a prime example for future study.

Right now, I'm not seeing as much as I'd like in the way of good evidence that our one-size-fits-all principle response to the COVID-19, i.e., flattening the curve through extreme social distancing, is the best response. Most of the comparisons out there to other countries and other pandemics (even between states and cities here in the U.S.) are problematic. And not enough serious thought, at least in my view, is being given to the amount of suffering that a world economy in tatters may eventually present.

Even if one accepts the most onerous predictions that tens and tens of thousands are going to die of coronavirus in the United States in the next few months, that's not a number of deaths that's way out of line for other forms of illness. But for a variety of reasons coronavirus has become an object of fear far beyond what it probably merits due to it's likely medical impact.

I can't help but wonder if photographs of empty store shelves, alleged mass grave sites “visible from space,” and stories of real individual heartbreak amplified in the media, and the labeling of critics as “irresponsible,” has anything to do with the panic.

If so, we'll all know just who to visit when this is all over.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, consultant and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time happily raising three children, llama farming and riding mountain bikes and motorcycles.