> think of the CDC as an organization that tells you to do a bunch of onerous, in-the-aggregate impossible tasks that you disregard for your own health and sani

> think of the CDC as an organization that tells you to do a bunch of onerous, in-the-aggregate impossible tasks that you disregard for your own health and sanity. This is the central dilemma of public health policy and public health messaging everywhere. I read a fascinating book once about public health messaging. The gist was, for the health of people, messaging from public institutions has to be extremely over-simplified and made rather blunt, because people in aggregate just won't follow nuanced, "more correct" advice effectively. But if they overdo the over-simplification, then it's not useful any more. People who are looking for nuance see that the advice is blunt and over-simplified, and may point out to each other that the institution is giving such advice, undermining trust in it. So it's a difficult line to walk. We have seen this recently in the England with Covid-19 advice to the public: It was too complicated, now it's changed to the "rule of six". The former advice was probably better advice if people had followed it, but people didn't follow it, for many reasons. So it had to be simplified into a simple, catchy message, in order to take into account people's reactions in aggregate to the type of advice. I tend to imagine this is frustrating for well-informed public health scientists.