The Omicron Information Vacuum

More information and more uncertainty.

 
The news about the Omicron COVID variant last week reminded me of March 11, 2020—the day when it felt like the United States truly entered the pandemic. In a span of less than three hours we learned that Tom Hanks had gotten COVID; that an NBA game had been canceled just before tip-off, prompting the NBA to shut down its whole season; and that in a national address, the president had announced a European travel ban. Despite being used to fast-paced news cycles, watching it all unfold on my Twitter feed that day made it feel like the fabric of reality was fraying a bit.

We know now that the virus already had its hooks in every aspect of our lives by the time professional sports shut down. What felt like a violent stoppage of life was actually the result of a failure to behave proactively. But I can still feel the whiplash from that evening. A retrospective piece about March 11 on ESPN described it aptly as “a day that started in one reality and ended in a new one.”

COVID news travels fast, but over the last year, I’ve felt as if I’ve acclimated as much as possible to the dynamic. The epidemiology crowd I follow on Twitter begins chattering—often sharing early, tentative reports of a change in virus behavior (case counts or hospitalizations) or a new potential variant of concern on the horizon. I listlessly click through genome-sequencing charts I’m not qualified to read and I log everything I’ve seen, filing it away in the back of my mind for later, when there is more information. Over time, more information always comes. And if the data in question shift from “future concern” to “actionable concern,” my feeds change. The news filters from the epidemiology crowd to the “COVID journalist” crowd to the “high-follower-count COVID watchers” crowd to the “COVID pundits” crowd to the “COVID skeptics/panickers” crowd. That process usually takes some time—days, even weeks. Once my feed indicates that people have incorporated the new data into their culture-war arguments, I take it as a sign that the news cycle has reached the maturation stage.

Συνέχεια εδώ

Πηγή: Galaxy Brain —  ενημερωτικό δελτίο από τον Charlie Warzel 

Για μετάφραση: translate.google.gr