There’s nothing like a politicized pandemic to bring home the importance of reality-testing, I’ve found. Over the course of the last 8 months I’ve been on the same roller coaster ride as everyone else, adapting to lockdown, filtering the news for updates on best practices, and coping with cabin fever after the loss of my best friend Badget last November. This is a recap of the toll these stresses have been taking on my mental health, and the perspective I’ve gained on red state/blue state information market failures that have been unfolding to every epidemiologist’s chagrin this year in the U.S. pandemic response.
So far I haven’t had symptoms or experienced any identifiable exposures that would justify getting tested, and my workplace hasn’t yet been required to shut down (knock on wood!). And as an added blessing, I live in the state of Washington, where local newspapers and state government leaders have taken responsible charge of public health measures to protect residents and inform the public of what is going on. But I get glimpses of what’s going on in red states from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and it’s scary. What’s even scarier is that some of the fake news headlines get past my scientific thinking filters, too. They interfere with my ability to see the forest for the trees.
In March, I spotted an opportunity for volunteers to get involved with COVID-19 science on the data science contest website kaggle. I ended up spending several months helping out there as a health science resource person among computer scientists who were kindly volunteering their time and energy to help sort and summarize research reports that were flying hither and thither on preprint portals and (some of them) making their way into the peer reviewed literature. This felt like a rewarding and meaningful use of my time at first, and proved an excellent way to meet people in data science careers and learn something about how computers can help solve public health problems.
But by mid-May, the sheer intensity of the conspiracy theory chatter in my social media feed was getting to me. I started to question what I was doing. I started to slip back into those weak spots in my character where a slight uptick in my global perception of salience, a dopamine-regulated sensation that tells you that everything going on in your environment has something to do with you personally, would tap into the wacky world of Trump’s Twitter following and I would wonder whose nefarious purposes the pandemic actually served. Could it be a propaganda experiment, testing the waters for stranger things to come?
What tipped the scales was actually a ray of hope. I was deeply alarmed to hear that the President of New Zealand was celebrating several weeks of testing without a single positive test result in her entire country. As a scientist, I found that accomplishment difficult to credit even for a well-managed island country. I thought there had to be some kind of profound error behind the report. I had heard that the Maori community felt excluded and vulnerable and had organized protests over the handling of New Zealand’s pandemic response. I assumed that like Australia, New Zealand experienced illegal immigration by boat, and that this flow of potential index patients would make such an early success story logically impossible to achieve, even if all other pandemic response measures were perfectly planned and implemented. All it would take would be one illegal American, for heaven’s sake, one string-pulling Yankee who can get past customs, or one boatload of economic refugees from a country that can’t afford as robust of a pandemic response. (According to more recent reports, America now accounts for 170,000+ of a global total of 800,000 known COVID-19 deaths. Hence the global travel ban on Americans.)
So I backed off of kaggle, and switched my focus to other research hobbies and non-COVID-19 related pastimes to avoid getting sucked any further into the void. This helped in the long run, but it left me a bit shaken up and disoriented, to say the least. Only recently have I felt comfortable writing about COVID-19 again.
As often happens in schizophrenia, those closest to me took the brunt of my paranoia and frustration when I was having a particularly hard time with reality-testing. A little Euripides, a play by Sartre, and BAM! I felt like I was in the middle of a Greek tragedy, and the writing on the walls was written in blood. But my family played it cool and didn’t put me on the spot about the slippage in my sanity index, and I finally worked up the wherewithal to take back what I said today.
As unpleasant as it is to hear your friends tell you that you sound crazy when you’re telling them how you feel and what’s on your mind, sometimes that’s exactly what you need to hear. And they did. So here we are.
Even before I took a break from writing about COVID-19, I recognized the connection between what I was going through and what millions of Americans in red states are going through right now. Fox owns all the local news, and is probably taking fake news ads from the manufacturers of hydroxychloroquine and now, the purveyors of convalescent plasma. How are they supposed to know that? Who are they supposed to trust?
The internet killed journalism 20 years ago. Peer review isn’t showing its best side these days either. Statisticians I talk to are shredding nearly every major paper to come out about COVID-19 therapeutics without showing a shred of hope for humanity, because the bullshit is coming at us from all sides in a publish-or-perish state of mayhem at universities where quality control has gone by the wayside and journals are in the mood to simply shrug and say, “we get a lot of submissions every day, you know.” And they might add, “and nobody has time to referee any of them.” They’re too busy writing their own.
