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Coronavirus: Six months after sheltering, why things fell apart - The Mercury News

Coronavirus: Six months after sheltering, why things fell apart - The Mercury News

Coronavirus: Six months after sheltering, why things fell apart - The Mercury News
Sep 13, 2020 1 min, 54 secs

But our reaction to a different natural disaster – the coronavirus — is profoundly personal and often divisive, revealing differences in risk perception, governance and equity as vast as the Golden State.

“Every day, 40 million people make 20 individual decisions,” said Dr.

From the beginning, COVID-19 has been a complicated threat, invisible and abstract.

But it’s tougher to sustain vigilance — especially as the closures, initially intended to be brief, have dragged on.

While an earthquake is a shared trauma, a virus — especially one transmitted with no symptoms — is an abstract threat, affecting different people in different ways.

And the worst of the pandemic has shifted to agricultural areas, clustered in Central Valley counties with the highest per capita case counts in the state.

George Rutherford, is that the state handed over responsibility to the counties, and what had become a unified response fell apart.

Meanwhile, local politicians pressured county health officials to ease restrictions on struggling businesses and frazzled residents.

Orange County reversed its rules about mandatory masks on June 11.

Around the state, churches have defied county and state orders to limit indoor services.

In more rural areas, he said, counties “just don’t have the infrastructure, the personnel, the experience or the resources to deal with the epidemic.”.

California’s fractured approach violates one of the core principals of risk communication in an emergency: “Deliver a clear and consistent message by trusted messengers,” said Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

And the messengers were politicized: Republicans said the threat was exaggerated, killing jobs and undermining the president.

“You cannot fight something without a goal and a measure,” he said.

“It’s a rational response to unpleasant information,”  said economist Plamen Nikolov of the State University of New York at Binghamton, who is studying responses to the pandemic.

Without accurate information, we may underestimate the true risk, he said.

Moreover, humans are terrible at understanding exponential growth — failing to save enough for retirement, for example — so we underprepared for the virus’s quick arrival.

Without greater funding, she said, protections are hard for people in small crowded apartments who work at essential jobs.

Nearly one-third of newly-infected people in prosperous Los Angeles County refused to talk to a county disease investigator — or vanished.

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