"COVID-shaming" -- As odious and as ineffective as "fat-shaming"

Last update: Friday 2/19/21

Editor's note: Regular readers of this blog know that as a retired college professor, I have been continuously disappointed by the persistent tendency of the members of the president's task force, first Trump's and now Biden's, to attempt to get more people to adhere to the social mitigation guidelines or, more recently, to get more people to get vaccinated by "shaming" them. As per the title of this blog note, shaming is an odious and ineffective practice that doesn't belong in the school yards, where most of us first encountered it, in sports, in doctor's offices, nor in task force briefings. 

Teachers and coaches know that persuading students in a classroom or players on a field to change their behaviors requires empathy and positive reinforcement for small improvements, all the more so if the undesirable behaviors are deeply ingrained. Throwing up charts that show that we're "moving in the wrong direction" and then chiding us for our misbehavior doesn't cut it. I have argued in another note on this blog that we need a different kind of task force composed of local activists who would organize their communities into self-help groups whose members would reinforce each other's efforts to adhere to the guidelines. 

• "We need a different kind of coronavirus task force", Last update:11/28/20

Now that vaccines are becoming widely available, members of these local self-help groups could share their experiences with the vaccination process because people are more likely to get vaccinated when they hear from friends and associates who have been vaccinated than if they are chided by members of the task force or other pundit doctors on TV,

Finally, as we more further and further into the pandemic, i.e., as more and more people become vaccinated and/or infected, the unflattened curves on the charts and the chidings of the pundit doctors will become less appropriate than ever. Many experts suggest that the number of people who have actually been infected is at least four times the number of people who have been tested and received positive test results. According to the CDC's data tracker page on Thursday 2/18/21, the total number of COVID cases in the U.S. was 27,669,556, i.e., about 28 million. This suggests that the total number of actual infections = 4 X 28 million, a bit less than 120 million. That's a lot of people.

• One implication of this large number is the increasing likelihood that the video clips on TV that show boisterous sports fans clustered close together in bars, without masks, after big games like the Super Bowl, may not be super spreader events; they may actually be relatively safe celebrations of gregarious folks who are immune because they have already been infected (and/or vaccinated).
  
  
• Travel on weekends and holidays is also likely to increase as more and more people become infected and/or vaccinated. So the pundit doctors' tut-tutting about irresponsible travelers will not only be ineffective; it will become increasingly fake news.