COVID-19 presents governments with a tough communications problem. People respond quite readily to an immediate threat to their own or their families' health. S

COVID-19 presents governments with a tough communications problem. People respond quite readily to an immediate threat to their own or their families' health. So while I agree that the fear people have in terms of catching the virus themselves is quite overblown, that fear also helps get them to do the right thing. For the vast majority of people, this is not a direct health crisis. It's an optimizations problem where governments have to balance the total death rate, total life years lost, the capacity of the healthcare system and the future consequences of the economic downturn containment actions will affect. Fear works better than that kind of complex, uncertain calculus as a public motivator.