The virus can spread before symptoms appear, and does so most easily through five P’s: people in prolonged, poorly ventilated, protection-free proximity. T he spiral begins when people forget that controlling the pandemic means doing many things at once. But humans don’t have to rely on luck unlike ants, we have a capacity for introspection. Ant death spirals break only when enough workers accidentally blunder away, creating trails that lead the spiraling workers to safety. must reset its mindset to accomplish both. Now come fall, the season of preparation, and winter, the season of survival. pandemic response, and a glimpse at the future if they continue unchecked. Here, then, are nine errors of intuition that still hamstring the U.S. “The grand challenge now is, how can we adjust our thinking to match the problem before us?” says Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disasters. The country is now trapped in an intuition nightmare: Like the spiraling ants, Americans are walled in by their own unhelpful instincts, which lead them round and round in self-destructive circles. And instead of overriding misleading intuitions with calm and considered communication, those leaders intensified them. They prevented citizens from grasping the scope of the crisis and pushed leaders toward bad policies. They manifested again and again, distorting the debate around whether to stay at home, wear masks, or open colleges. These conceptual errors were not egregious lies or conspiracy theories, but they were still dangerous. Following these impulses was simpler than navigating a web of solutions, staring down broken systems, and accepting that the pandemic would rage for at least a year. They lapsed into magical thinking, and believed that the world would return to normal within months. They saw the actions that individual people were taking, and blamed and shamed their neighbors. They grabbed onto whatever solution was most prominent in the moment, and bounced from one (often false) hope to the next. Many Americans trusted intuition to help guide them through this disaster. But the toll continues to be enormous-every day, the case count rises by around 40,000 and the death toll by around 800-because the country has consistently thought about the pandemic in the same unproductive ways. The toll has been enormous because the country presented the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with a smorgasbord of vulnerabilities to exploit. enters the ninth month of the pandemic with more than 6.3 million confirmed cases and more than 189,000 confirmed deaths. I can think of no better metaphor for the United States of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This phenomenon is called the death spiral. They are imprisoned by a wall of their own instincts. They have no coordinating force to guide them to safety. The ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead. They march endlessly until they’re felled by exhaustion or dehydration. They become a thick, swirling vortex of bodies that resembles a hurricane as viewed from space. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. ET on September 13, 2020.Īrmy ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die.
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