Embracing ‘the Continual Wrenching of Experience’
“They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.”—Douglas Adams in “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish”
Passage of time changes many things. Given enough time, rain can wear away mountains.
The coronavirus pandemic has lasted longer than many feared, though the mountains still stand. Yet even with the passage of time, and increased knowledge of the virus and its variants, we continue finding ourselves mired in mistakes made in the early days of 2020.
I’ve written before on the ideas behind successful communications to build successful operations in a crisis environment. Principles such as responding quickly, accurately and honestly—being first is meaningless, if you’re wrong or deceptive. Once lost, credibility is difficult to regain. Show that you care about and possess respect for those around you, stoicism can be mistaken for uncaring. Don’t be afraid to give people something to do to help, because a lack of guidance can result in unwanted actions as people try to “do something” to help.
In the spring of 2022, poor messaging has again contributed to a concerning rise in COVID-19 cases.
A good example of mixed messaging, a hallmark of poor communications, is the number of TV news stations cheerily announcing “Maskless Monday,” or some similar alliteration, as mask mandates expired or were ended. The message the news organizations were giving the public was almost celebratory: “No more masks!” they hailed. Meanwhile, in a barely audible whisper from Atlanta, the CDC said, “We still recommend wearing masks on public transportation.”
To be fair to the media, the CDC’s early messaging contributed to their diminished status in many newsrooms. The CDC and other government health officials seldom challenged politicians who called coronavirus “the flu,” back when few would have guessed the U.S. alone would have almost a million COVID-19 deaths just two years later.
They participated in the “masks are useless” deception to give the government time to secure personal protective equipment before people swarmed into stores, as they would for toilet paper. Once they reversed themselves on masks, and later upped the recommendation to masks meeting the higher N- and KN-95 filtration standards, they did little to combat the misinformation of the many who, even in 2022, were still embracing those early 2020 mask fibs.
Many health officials also allowed themselves to get sucked into the public power struggles between those embracing an “all is well” fantasy and those who pushed for serious mitigations to combat the pandemic. It’s one thing to be apolitical. It’s another to fail to point out falsehoods by the political class.
A good leader needs to be prepared to accept the responsibility of doing the right thing. It’s part of that two-way loyalty that good leaders embrace, and it wasn’t always present in many leading the coronavirus response. Having started with a quote from left-leaning Douglas Adams, I’ll conclude by paraphrasing a character played by right-leaning Tom Selleck. When a political boss attempts to interfere with him, he’ll say something like: “You can fire me, but you can’t tell me how to do my job.”
Sadly, we weren’t always served by people who put doing their job first.
Coincidental note: A book by Dr. Deborah Birx, head of COVID-19 response under President Trump and an eyewitness to his suggestion to “inject disinfectants,” will be released Tue., April 26. It’s title: “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late.”