Bulletproof

There's a story on National Public Radio's website that uses the young daughter of reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, as the entry point to an exploration of why some children may have managed to ward off being infected with SARS-CoV-2. The story explores the effects of being exposed to other coronaviruses, the protections that the retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) receptors offer in children and makes passing mention of the fact that children, for all that they tend to come across to adults as self-propelled bio-warfare agents, are fairly good at dealing with diseases (otherwise, there likely wouldn't be very many of them, with predictable results for the species as a whole).

But the whole thing started from the premise that given the young Miss Doucleff had been in a room with someone who was later found to be infectious on more than one occasion, she should have contracted the virus and become ill at some point. While this is taken for granted however, it's never really backed up.

It's understood that the many variants of SARS-CoV-2 have varying levels of virulence and some of them are quite transmissible. But even the Omicron variant, which was considered highly contagious, didn't manage to infect everyone that a carrier might come into contact with. R0, which, remember, presumes no precautions and a completely naïve population, never rises to infinity. An estimated R0 for the Omicron BA.2 variant of about 12 is pretty high, but measles still beats it out at 16. And it's understood that not everyone who comes into contact with someone who has the measles will contract the disease.

So why treat a child managing to avoid becoming sick as if it were some sort of unique event? I suspect that part of the answer is that this is an NPR story, and the political dimension to the coverage of, and public reaction to, the disease outbreak has to be taken into account. NPR's audience, like most of the American Left seems to have a heightened perception of risk from the virus, and NPR's coverage both reflects and validates that risk. Who has the greater influence on whom is open to debate, but I think of it as something of a symbiotic relationship, with NPR both reacting to, and calibrating, the expectations of the audience. It's the nature of the news business, and news is, after all, a business.

The idea that people are poor at evaluating risk has become a cliché. And while the idea that "perception is reality" is also something of a cliché, it's also very (if not perhaps completely) true. And so coverage of events, including the pandemic, generally has to start somewhere that is recognizable to the audience. And to the degree that left-leaning audiences view the threat of SARS-CoV-2 as ever-present, the story needed to present it that way.