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> It is an example of how the C.D.C. is struggling to communicate effectively, and leaving many people confused about what’s truly risky. I don't understand ho

by js2 5y ago

> It is an example of how the C.D.C. is struggling to communicate effectively, and leaving many people confused about what’s truly risky. I don't understand how this happened. The C.D.C. literally has a manual on how to communicate effectively during an outbreak: https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/ppt/cerc_2014edition_Copy.pdf https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/ppt/cerc_2014edition_Copy.pdf

mhb 5y ago
Seems like no one there has read the manual: "Throughout this book, six principles of effective crisis and risk communication are emphasized: 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating information quickly is almost always important. For members of the public, the first source of information often becomes the preferred source. 2. Be Right: Accuracy establishes credibility. Information can include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps. 3. Be Credible: Honesty and truthfulness should not be compromised during crises. 4. Express Empathy: Crises create harm, and the suffering should be acknowledged in words. Addressing what people are feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and rapport. 5. Promote Action: Giving people meaningful things to do calms anxiety, helps restore order, and promotes a restored sense of control. 6. Show Respect: Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful communication promotes cooperation and rapport."
- andrewljohnson 5y ago
  Value #1 seems pretty at odds with 2 and 3, and dangerous with #5. I wonder how the CDC reconciles this... surely Be Right is more important than Be First. A spammy news site could claim most of these values in this order.
  - pasquinelli 5y ago
    it's really not complicated: tell the public as soon as possible what is known and be honest with them about what isn't.
  - j4yav 5y ago
    #1 could be just opening up the communication channels and sharing where you are at with the rest.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    No, 2 includes "what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps". Being honest about "we don't have an answer to this yet but are working on it" helps with the others.
    - oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
      The CDC had a special way of being dishonest here: They claimed and continue to claim there is zero knowledge available unless there are a dozen studies from the right institutions confirming it. This led them to be months behind on realizing that COVID was airborne.
- breck 5y ago
  To me it seems like something has fundamentally changed in the world in the past decade. If you are an information worker and want to have credibility, you need to put things on git. Otherwise you lose credibility. It's sort of like the difference between hearsay and the written word. Anything not backed by git nowadays I consider as hearsay.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    "Hearsay" is a bit of a misnomer because it encompasses any statement made by someone else - oral, written, non-verbal, git repo, etc.
    - breck 5y ago
      Yeah, it was rushed writing on my part. Basically there's an OOM difference in the credibility between things published with a backing git repo and those where just the artifacts are published.
- rayiner 5y ago
  > Seems like no one there has read the manual: You can say that again! > 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating information quickly is almost always important. For members of the public, the first source of information often becomes the preferred source. Fauci saying masks don’t work before he said the opposite. > 2. Be Right: Accuracy establishes credibility. Information can include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps. Instead of saying they didn’t have enough information about outdoor transmission, they threw out the 10% number as a random CYA. See above about the first number being sticky. > 3. Be Credible: Honesty and truthfulness should not be compromised during crises. Fauci saying masks don’t work, and also the 10% number being thrown out there without caveating that it’s a wild ass guess. > 4. Express Empathy: Crises create harm, and the suffering should be acknowledged in words. Addressing what people are feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and rapport. Fauci berating people for being upset that their lives are being shut down by government orders. > 6. Show Respect: Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful communication promotes cooperation and rapport. Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the country.
  - at-fates-hands 5y ago
    > 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating information quickly is almost always important. An I correct in remembering the CDC taking its talking points from the Chinese officials who had a vested interest in spreading disinformation and falsehoods about where and how the virus started?
    - HonestOp001 5y ago
      That was the WHO. Faucii is technically trying to avoid being found out that he has connections to starting everything when an organization he had his hooks in had operations in the Wuhan lab.
  - js2 5y ago
    > Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the country. I don't think this is entirely fair. I'd invite you to at least listen to what local public health officials were dealing with: https://khn.org/news/article/public-health-officials-year-of-threats-menace-santa-cruz-california/ https://khn.org/news/article/public-health-officials-year-of... https://www.thisamericanlife.org/736/the-herd https://www.thisamericanlife.org/736/the-herd A significant and vocal portion of the country thinks its okay to bully and berate officials. Anna Maria Barry-Jester: "People are not willing to be governed," at least not by officials who ask them to make sacrifices for their neighbors. And as a result, the officials, trying to govern us are quitting in droves. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 250 public health officials working in communities all over the US have left their jobs, many because of threats and political pushback. Nearly one in six Americans now lives in a community that has lost its local health department leader during the pandemic, officials like Mimi and Gail. It's the largest exodus of health officials in US history.
- lucas_membrane 5y ago
  They left out one possible recommendation: Tell the whole truth. Failure to do that was a big mistake by the powers that were during the 1918 flu unpleasantness. The lesson has been lost.
mjburgess 5y ago
Since regan and the politically troubled vaccination programmes of the 70s, the senior staff at the CDC are all political appointments. Effectively, they're in-house politicians who serve the (PR) interests of elected politicians. Actual independent health professionals aren't the ones doing the communication; and have been generally forbidden from doing so.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Interesting that this is downvoted, it's the actual answer to the question.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
breck 5y ago
A PDF, lol. Further evidence of the problem. There's one trick they can do to regain trust—move their website, publications, datasets, press releases, *everything* to git (https://breckyunits.com/how-to-fix-the-cdc.html https://breckyunits.com/how-to-fix-the-cdc.html). I wish they came out and said: "We understand we will constantly make mistakes and bad actors will constantly try to influence us. To counter that, we will make it painless for people to fork and correct. Every change will be open, attributable and signed."
- JPKab 5y ago
  During the Obama administration, he put out an executive order for Federal Gov't agencies to open up their datasets. There were hardcore standards set, APIs, certain formats, etc. This is the same initiative that created data.gov. It was revolutionary and groundbreaking, and the various federal agencies essentially ignored it, and were allowed to. I'm talking about a full executive order, and I had a lot of expertise and was being tasked with helping agencies, including the VA and DOE, open up their data. HHS was also part of this. I was immediately blocked in all of these agencies with foot-dragging, and a complacent, "I couldn't give a fuck" attitude. They didn't care about enacting the order, because unlike me, they all knew that there would be no consequences for not doing so. They didn't do it, and there were no consequences. I voted for Obama twice, but one of the things I noticed about his administration was that they weren't willing to strike fear into the hearts of bureaucrats who undermined their objectives. Another executive program he pushed, for properly integrating military health systems with the VA's health systems, was also actively ignored by the VA, with zero consequences. That experience was the final straw for me to leave and join the private sector, and get out of DC permanently.
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    Just out of curiosity, what would that look like in concrete terms? Can the president credibly threaten to fire people or mess with their funding?
    - setr 5y ago
JPKab 5y ago
A charitable take: They didn't read their own manuals, which is extremely common in US Federal Government agencies, and really any large bureaucracies. A less charitable/borderline hostile take: Biden is extremely likely to not run for re-election (due to his health), and has some extremely ambitious legislation he is pushing which will cement his legacy. He and his advisers don't believe they will maintain control of the House of Representatives in 2022, and are justifying many of these changes with the crisis of the pandemic. If the pandemic doesn't appear to be a crisis, the odds of this legislation being passed are lower. Probably the most frustrating part of all of this is the fact that the April job's numbers (1 million jobs predicted, actual was a 1/4 of that) were hand-waved away with "people can't work when their kid's schools are shut", as if the administration hasn't helped justify schools remaining closed in certain states. (I live in Colorado, a blue state, and our schools have been open since January with no issues, as opposed to Oregon, where they are still closed.)
- y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
  > as opposed to Oregon, where they are still closed This is false. I live in Oregon and my kid's school has been open since February. Both our elementary school and middle school are dealing with a minor COVID-19 outbreak too and they're small schools in a very wealthy city (median household income is over 110k), so I question the authenticity of your "no issues" comment regarding Colorado schools. EDIT: just checked, our local high school has more than double the cases of our elementary and middle school combined. Yeah I'm really doubting the "no issues" part, but I guess "issue" is relative
  - JPKab 5y ago
    You "question the authenticity" of my statement. I'm sorry, but this is part of the misinformation. Of course there are positive cases of COVID in schools, and of course high schools (my son is a freshman) have higher rates. This is explained by the science, which clearly shows that high school age groups have dramatically higher rates of transmission. It's more about the risks. All of the teachers in Colorado were prioritized for vaccines. They are all vaccinated in my county (Jefferson County, which has almost 600,000 residents). Which leaves the bigger question: What's the risk to the students, and to the people they can spread it to? To the students, the data clearly shows that it's minimal, unless they have comorbidities. According to the CDC's latest data, here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics 350 people between ages 5-17 have died of COVID in the US. This age group represents 16.3 percent of the US population, or roughly 56 million people. You were correct that I was wrong about Oregon. My brother's kids are still out of school because his wife is terrified of them catching covid, and she kept them remote. They are ages 5 and 7, respectively. She's been one of the most extreme overreacters in the pandemic. She lived like a shut in for 8 months, and she's healthy and in her 30s. Now onto the question of the danger the kids pose to the public by spreading covid to their families or vulnerable people. At this point, the majority of Americans over 60 are vaccinated. Vulnerable people were prioritized. Which is why you aren't seeing news reports of droves of people dying in Colorado as a result of schools being opened. All of these decisions represent trade-offs, but too many in the US public seem to not understand relative risk. I am safer if I wear a helmet when I drive my car than otherwise, but I'm not going to, for the same reason you don't.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I mean, their whole raison d'etre is to manage disease outbreaks, and at the start of the outbreak they were caught with neither basic supplies (PPE, respirators, etc) nor plans for provisioning the same. They also tried to roll their own tests which proved faulty and labor-intensive rather than using the WHO standard tests (though as luck would have it, testing capacity doesn't seem to have been a strong predictor of success in combatting the virus). So I'm not entirely surprised that the CDC is struggling to communicate effectively during this outbreak. I have the board game "pandemic" which came out some years before COVID, and I remember thinking about how cool the CDC was, as though it was one of the few agencies that had its shit somewhat together (the only other which springs to mind is NASA though no doubt NASA also has its share of mismanagement). Boy was I wrong.
bsder 5y ago
Perhaps this happened because we had an entire political leadership calling it a "liberal hoax" shibboleth at the same time that the CDC was trying to ring alarm bells? "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it."

by js2 5y ago

mhb 5y ago

Seems like no one there has read the manual: "Throughout this book, six principles of effective crisis and risk communication are emphasized: 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating information quickly is almost always important. For members of the public, the first source of information often becomes the preferred source. 2. Be Right: Accuracy establishes credibility. Information can include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps. 3. Be Credible: Honesty and truthfulness should not be compromised during crises. 4. Express Empathy: Crises create harm, and the suffering should be acknowledged in words. Addressing what people are feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and rapport. 5. Promote Action: Giving people meaningful things to do calms anxiety, helps restore order, and promotes a restored sense of control. 6. Show Respect: Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful communication promotes cooperation and rapport."

andrewljohnson 5y ago
Value #1 seems pretty at odds with 2 and 3, and dangerous with #5. I wonder how the CDC reconciles this... surely Be Right is more important than Be First. A spammy news site could claim most of these values in this order.
- pasquinelli 5y ago
  it's really not complicated: tell the public as soon as possible what is known and be honest with them about what isn't.
- j4yav 5y ago
  #1 could be just opening up the communication channels and sharing where you are at with the rest.
- Izkata 5y ago
  No, 2 includes "what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps". Being honest about "we don't have an answer to this yet but are working on it" helps with the others.
  - oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
    The CDC had a special way of being dishonest here: They claimed and continue to claim there is zero knowledge available unless there are a dozen studies from the right institutions confirming it. This led them to be months behind on realizing that COVID was airborne.
breck 5y ago
To me it seems like something has fundamentally changed in the world in the past decade. If you are an information worker and want to have credibility, you need to put things on git. Otherwise you lose credibility. It's sort of like the difference between hearsay and the written word. Anything not backed by git nowadays I consider as hearsay.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  "Hearsay" is a bit of a misnomer because it encompasses any statement made by someone else - oral, written, non-verbal, git repo, etc.
  - breck 5y ago
    Yeah, it was rushed writing on my part. Basically there's an OOM difference in the credibility between things published with a backing git repo and those where just the artifacts are published.
rayiner 5y ago
> Seems like no one there has read the manual: You can say that again! > 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating information quickly is almost always important. For members of the public, the first source of information often becomes the preferred source. Fauci saying masks don’t work before he said the opposite. > 2. Be Right: Accuracy establishes credibility. Information can include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps. Instead of saying they didn’t have enough information about outdoor transmission, they threw out the 10% number as a random CYA. See above about the first number being sticky. > 3. Be Credible: Honesty and truthfulness should not be compromised during crises. Fauci saying masks don’t work, and also the 10% number being thrown out there without caveating that it’s a wild ass guess. > 4. Express Empathy: Crises create harm, and the suffering should be acknowledged in words. Addressing what people are feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and rapport. Fauci berating people for being upset that their lives are being shut down by government orders. > 6. Show Respect: Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful communication promotes cooperation and rapport. Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the country.
- at-fates-hands 5y ago
  > 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating information quickly is almost always important. An I correct in remembering the CDC taking its talking points from the Chinese officials who had a vested interest in spreading disinformation and falsehoods about where and how the virus started?
  - HonestOp001 5y ago
    That was the WHO. Faucii is technically trying to avoid being found out that he has connections to starting everything when an organization he had his hooks in had operations in the Wuhan lab.
- js2 5y ago
  > Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the country. I don't think this is entirely fair. I'd invite you to at least listen to what local public health officials were dealing with: https://khn.org/news/article/public-health-officials-year-of-threats-menace-santa-cruz-california/ https://khn.org/news/article/public-health-officials-year-of... https://www.thisamericanlife.org/736/the-herd https://www.thisamericanlife.org/736/the-herd A significant and vocal portion of the country thinks its okay to bully and berate officials. Anna Maria Barry-Jester: "People are not willing to be governed," at least not by officials who ask them to make sacrifices for their neighbors. And as a result, the officials, trying to govern us are quitting in droves. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 250 public health officials working in communities all over the US have left their jobs, many because of threats and political pushback. Nearly one in six Americans now lives in a community that has lost its local health department leader during the pandemic, officials like Mimi and Gail. It's the largest exodus of health officials in US history.
lucas_membrane 5y ago
They left out one possible recommendation: Tell the whole truth. Failure to do that was a big mistake by the powers that were during the 1918 flu unpleasantness. The lesson has been lost.

mjburgess 5y ago

Since regan and the politically troubled vaccination programmes of the 70s, the senior staff at the CDC are all political appointments. Effectively, they're in-house politicians who serve the (PR) interests of elected politicians. Actual independent health professionals aren't the ones doing the communication; and have been generally forbidden from doing so.

mjburgess 5y ago
Interesting that this is downvoted, it's the actual answer to the question.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

breck 5y ago

A PDF, lol. Further evidence of the problem. There's one trick they can do to regain trust—move their website, publications, datasets, press releases, *everything* to git (https://breckyunits.com/how-to-fix-the-cdc.html https://breckyunits.com/how-to-fix-the-cdc.html). I wish they came out and said: "We understand we will constantly make mistakes and bad actors will constantly try to influence us. To counter that, we will make it painless for people to fork and correct. Every change will be open, attributable and signed."

JPKab 5y ago
During the Obama administration, he put out an executive order for Federal Gov't agencies to open up their datasets. There were hardcore standards set, APIs, certain formats, etc. This is the same initiative that created data.gov. It was revolutionary and groundbreaking, and the various federal agencies essentially ignored it, and were allowed to. I'm talking about a full executive order, and I had a lot of expertise and was being tasked with helping agencies, including the VA and DOE, open up their data. HHS was also part of this. I was immediately blocked in all of these agencies with foot-dragging, and a complacent, "I couldn't give a fuck" attitude. They didn't care about enacting the order, because unlike me, they all knew that there would be no consequences for not doing so. They didn't do it, and there were no consequences. I voted for Obama twice, but one of the things I noticed about his administration was that they weren't willing to strike fear into the hearts of bureaucrats who undermined their objectives. Another executive program he pushed, for properly integrating military health systems with the VA's health systems, was also actively ignored by the VA, with zero consequences. That experience was the final straw for me to leave and join the private sector, and get out of DC permanently.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what would that look like in concrete terms? Can the president credibly threaten to fire people or mess with their funding?
  - setr 5y ago

JPKab 5y ago

A charitable take: They didn't read their own manuals, which is extremely common in US Federal Government agencies, and really any large bureaucracies. A less charitable/borderline hostile take: Biden is extremely likely to not run for re-election (due to his health), and has some extremely ambitious legislation he is pushing which will cement his legacy. He and his advisers don't believe they will maintain control of the House of Representatives in 2022, and are justifying many of these changes with the crisis of the pandemic. If the pandemic doesn't appear to be a crisis, the odds of this legislation being passed are lower. Probably the most frustrating part of all of this is the fact that the April job's numbers (1 million jobs predicted, actual was a 1/4 of that) were hand-waved away with "people can't work when their kid's schools are shut", as if the administration hasn't helped justify schools remaining closed in certain states. (I live in Colorado, a blue state, and our schools have been open since January with no issues, as opposed to Oregon, where they are still closed.)

y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
> as opposed to Oregon, where they are still closed This is false. I live in Oregon and my kid's school has been open since February. Both our elementary school and middle school are dealing with a minor COVID-19 outbreak too and they're small schools in a very wealthy city (median household income is over 110k), so I question the authenticity of your "no issues" comment regarding Colorado schools. EDIT: just checked, our local high school has more than double the cases of our elementary and middle school combined. Yeah I'm really doubting the "no issues" part, but I guess "issue" is relative
- JPKab 5y ago
  You "question the authenticity" of my statement. I'm sorry, but this is part of the misinformation. Of course there are positive cases of COVID in schools, and of course high schools (my son is a freshman) have higher rates. This is explained by the science, which clearly shows that high school age groups have dramatically higher rates of transmission. It's more about the risks. All of the teachers in Colorado were prioritized for vaccines. They are all vaccinated in my county (Jefferson County, which has almost 600,000 residents). Which leaves the bigger question: What's the risk to the students, and to the people they can spread it to? To the students, the data clearly shows that it's minimal, unless they have comorbidities. According to the CDC's latest data, here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics 350 people between ages 5-17 have died of COVID in the US. This age group represents 16.3 percent of the US population, or roughly 56 million people. You were correct that I was wrong about Oregon. My brother's kids are still out of school because his wife is terrified of them catching covid, and she kept them remote. They are ages 5 and 7, respectively. She's been one of the most extreme overreacters in the pandemic. She lived like a shut in for 8 months, and she's healthy and in her 30s. Now onto the question of the danger the kids pose to the public by spreading covid to their families or vulnerable people. At this point, the majority of Americans over 60 are vaccinated. Vulnerable people were prioritized. Which is why you aren't seeing news reports of droves of people dying in Colorado as a result of schools being opened. All of these decisions represent trade-offs, but too many in the US public seem to not understand relative risk. I am safer if I wear a helmet when I drive my car than otherwise, but I'm not going to, for the same reason you don't.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I mean, their whole raison d'etre is to manage disease outbreaks, and at the start of the outbreak they were caught with neither basic supplies (PPE, respirators, etc) nor plans for provisioning the same. They also tried to roll their own tests which proved faulty and labor-intensive rather than using the WHO standard tests (though as luck would have it, testing capacity doesn't seem to have been a strong predictor of success in combatting the virus). So I'm not entirely surprised that the CDC is struggling to communicate effectively during this outbreak. I have the board game "pandemic" which came out some years before COVID, and I remember thinking about how cool the CDC was, as though it was one of the few agencies that had its shit somewhat together (the only other which springs to mind is NASA though no doubt NASA also has its share of mismanagement). Boy was I wrong.

bsder 5y ago

Perhaps this happened because we had an entire political leadership calling it a "liberal hoax" shibboleth at the same time that the CDC was trying to ring alarm bells? "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it."