Shelf-Life

A pair of quotes:

If in fact the shelf-life for vigilance in the U.S. is only about 3 months, new surges may occur in the fall in previously hard-hit regions such as the Northeast—unless residents remember to stay afraid.
Professor Robert M. Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken, In Defense Of Women.

I understand the idea that for many people "you should be afraid of this" is really just a way of saying "this frightens me." American English has about a million (give or take the odd hundred thousand) such shortcuts, and the fact that they may make it difficult to understand what someone is attempting to convey doesn't appear to be able to change that.

But people actively and intentionally calling for people to be afraid strikes me as a relatively new phenomenon. (It is possible, however, that I wasn't paying attention earlier.) In the environment of the SARS-2 coronavirus outbreak, fear of disease or death has taken on the aspect of a social virtue; people who are afraid are taking their responsibilities more seriously than people who seek to remain unfrightened. But even though the hobgoblin that is the pandemic is not imaginary, I'm not sure that keeping the populace alarmed is the best idea.

Fear might best be described as a state of negative anticipation due to a potential future event that a person believes that they can neither change nor accept. And given that, I understand why there is a desire for people to be afraid; it helps make the case for taking what often come across as extreme precautions. Here's the rub, though, as far as I'm concerned. Firstly, people don't have to be in constant fear in order to take precautions. While my current car will nag me if I pull out without my seat belt being fastened, my previous one did not, yet I routinely wore my seatbelt when out on the road. And even my current car often lacks the opportunity to nag me, since I put my seat belt on before going anywhere. And given my tendency to go for a drive at the drop of a hat, it seems dubious at best to cast me as always being afraid of being in a traffic accident. Secondly, constant anxiety is simply bad for people. If people need to fear for their lives every day until this pandemic is finally dealt with, that's a real problem.

There is also the fact that H.L. Mencken was not the only person to suspect that the political establishment uses fear for its ends, rather than those of the public. This mistrust (which is starting to become something of a regular thing around here) makes portraying the outbreak only in terms of the worst-case scenario is a high-risk strategy. Mainly because if the pandemic were as universally bad as it's often portrayed, it might no be such a problem. A serious respiratory infection that routinely places people in the hospital has a difficult time spreading. It's the randomness of the illness, the fact that for many people the term "illness" hardly seems to qualify, that is creating the problem. Not acknowledging that when people can see it makes it seem more credible when people allege that their government is conspiring against them.

Complacency and carelessness are concerns, to be sure. But those things are also baked into human nature. Expecting immediate fears, rather than longer-term behavior change to combat them seems like a dubious strategy.