As the pandemic drags on and countries try to grapple with how to achieve some semblance of normalcy in the fact of restrictions, they seem to have arrived at three general recommendations to help slow the spread of the virus. Wash hands with soap and water or use sanitizers, wear masks, and keep one’s distance from other people. While those seem straightforward enough, there are a lot of uncertainties within them. For example, when it comes to masks, while there has emerged a broad scientific consensus that wearing them is a good thing, what types of masks are better and are they meant to prevent the wearer from spreading infections to others or from getting infected by others or both?
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As the death toll goes past 200,000, health experts have been warning that we should brace ourselves for a surge in new coronavirus cases in the fall, especially if people start to let down their guard and not follow safety precautions, either because they got tired of being restricted or they felt that the crisis had passed. Recall that with the 1918 pandemic, it too started in the early part of that year, subsided in the middle, and then roared back towards the end of the year and most of the deaths occurred in that second phase.

This graphic from the New York Times suggests that there has been a recent surge in new cases, which is worrying.

When people have a terminal illness and are confronted with the real possibility of imminent death, one cannot fault them for taking desperate measures in the hope of a miracle cure. This was what we saw in the early days of the AIDS epidemic when people were dying in large numbers and there was no effective treatment. Sufferers felt that the conventional protocols for finding treatments that depended on the usual three phases of trials to ensure safety and efficacy were far too slow and that seriously ill patients should be allowed to try experimental treatments that had not met the standards for approval.
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We are currently awash in fake news and conspiracy theories. From reader Jason, I received this 2018 article that discussed what effect cognitive abilities have on people’s vulnerability to fake news. It highlights a particularly significant risk factor, that people they identified as having low cognitive ability have a particularly hard time rejecting misinformation.

What do they mean by ‘cognitive ability’?

First proposed by the cognitive psychologists Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks, this theory holds that some people are more prone to “mental clutter” than other people. In other words, some people are less able to discard (or “inhibit”) information from their working memory that is no longer relevant to the task at hand—or, as in the case of Nathalie, information that has been discredited. Research on cognitive aging indicates that, in adulthood, this ability declines considerably with advancing age, suggesting that older adults may also be especially vulnerable to fake news. Another reason why cognitive ability may predict vulnerability to fake news is that it correlates highly with education. Through education, people may develop meta-cognitive skills—strategies for monitoring and regulating one’s own thinking—that can be used to combat the effects of misinformation.

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According to the coronavirus dashboard created by Avi Schiffman, yesterday the US passed the 200,000 mark in deaths from the disease. The US continues to lead the world in both deaths and the number of cases, the latter number now about 6,800,000. The numbers are growing fast in India and Brazil.

What is infuriating is that the US numbers would have been much lower if Trump and the people around him and listened to the infectious disease and public health experts at the beginning and implemented their recommendations, most of which are extremely commonsensical, such as washing or sanitizing one’s hands, avoiding close proximity to others, and wearing masks, with the government coordinating a national policy of supplying protective equipment to health care personnel and the public and aggressively promoting widespread testing.

Instead we had, and continue to have, Trump promoting magical thinking that the virus will somehow disappear on its own, even though we now know that he was aware from almost the beginning that the virus was dangerous and could be transmitted by airborne particles.

After breezily and wrongly predicting, against all the evidence, that we should not worry about the coronavirus because it would magically go away, Trump is now predicting, again against all the evidence, that we should not worry about climate change because the world will magically get cooler.

During his visit to the US West Coast, Mr Trump repeated his argument that poor forest management was to blame as he met Californian officials involved in the battle against the wildfires at a stop near Sacramento, in the centre of the state.

Dismissing one official’s plea to not “ignore the science” on climate change, Mr Trump said: “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch… I don’t think science knows actually.”
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