It’s stupid that a public health issue has become so politicized, and that a man died attempting to enforce his company’s policy on requiring customers to wear masks. Governments are capitulating when there is backlash over proposal of requirements.
Similar, when governments began requiring wearing of seat belts, banning smoking in public spaces, etc. The public eventually adopted to these new requirements (yes there are exceptions).
There’s a lot of psychology involved with bucking against these sort of health mandates. Fear is probably the biggest. Fear of appearing weak, fear of losing freedoms, fear of admitting that we are all vulnerable.
We need a PR campaign that addresses these issues in a simple way that would better encourage all of us to think about each other.
The UK has one. There are commercials and other advertising from the Government, the NHS, the media (of all stripes) and so forth. Channel 4 literally has the words “Stay at home” appearing in small print in the top corner of the screen at virtually all times.
And this is because the British public in general love the NHS and want to protect it and all its workers. (That said, there are always a fair number of idiots and crazies around, but the general point holds.)
Someone would have to be responsible for the PR campaign. Who would that be? Do we have an authoritative body that is universally admired and listened to across the political spectrum? I can’t think of one.
In our current environment EVERYTHING is assumed to have a political underpinning. Even if it doesn’t start out that way, someone somewhere is going to go online and get a lot of people worked up because the “they” who is running the PR has voted a certain way in the past or funding comes from some mildly innocuous source that is traced to a certain leaning (corporate, media, religious, you name it).
So, in 2020 USA, non-political is not allowed to exist.
How can you have a bi-partisan campaign when half of the partisans don’t think this is a big deal that requires masks and social distancing? The leader and vice-leader of those partisans refuse to set examples by wearing masks themselves, and actively encourage people to violate social distancing rules by protesting their own government. Your suggestion is silly from the start.
IMHO Trump, Pence and many Republicans are committing bad leadership when not offering proper examples like presidents did in the recent past:
While that is about vaccines (and Trump showed already a lot of irresponsibility about vaccines) just replace “vaccines” with “masks” and you will notice how scatterbrained the way of giving examples is coming from the current administration.
And for this pandemic, it looks like masks are one of the best ways to limit the number of infected and dead going forward.
That’s not true. You’re practicing the very thing you accuse many of those on the right accuse of the left. Not every liberal thinks the same way just as every conservative doesn’t think the same way.
So is there another entity or groups of entities that would be seen to have respected regard similar to the NHS in the UK?
The CDC or the NIH, I guess. Maybe HHS? Would they be allowed to do that kind of PSA? Doubtful. What you no doubt understand, but somehow seem to be ignoring, is that the head of the USA would be against such a message, and is actively working against such a message. That doesn’t leave any federal entities available to push this non-partisan message.
Some huge majority of conservatives watch Fox News and nothing else, and Fox News isn’t about to push this message, that’s for sure. The other side of the partisan divide has more diverse news sources, but none of them are considered non-partisan anymore, because the president refers to them as the lamestream media.
The National Weather Service couldn’t get a message out that contradicted the president. When the HHS website said that their stockpile was for the States and Jared Kushner said otherwise, they changed the website. Could HHS get that message out? Doubtful.
Mods, I’m sorry if my answer seems political, but I don’t know how to respond to this thread in a non-political way. The reason why we can’t get this message out is political.
Pew Research: 5 facts about partisan reactions to COVID-19 in the U.S.
[ol]
[li] Majorities in both parties say that a range of restrictions have been necessary to confront the outbreak. [/li][li] There is a wide partisan gap on views of President Donald Trump’s response to the outbreak. [/li][li] Democrats are more likely than Republicans to see the coronavirus in the most serious terms.[/li][li] Similar shares of Republicans and Democrats say someone in their household has either lost a job or taken a pay cut.[/li][li] Republicans and Democrats differ on how people across the country are reacting to the outbreak.[/li][/ol]
I don’t see much space for bipartisan cooperation. One side accepts science, the other resists reality. Sad.
Good luck with that. Despite the claims of the reopen people that “now we have learned to be safe, business can reopen because we will practice distancing and wear masks”, the leader of ReOpen NC is calling for boycotts of businesses that require their customers to wear masks.
I’ve been seeing this one-minute PSA from the CDC for well over a month now. It’s been on various cable channels, even ones you wouldn’t expect, like HBO. This one doesn’t mention wearing a mask but it demonstrates that they certainly were allowed to do that sort of thing.
To some extent the issue is an active (…political) backlash against restrictions. But doing a lot more walking nowadays to replace going to the gym I can easily see that following the guidelines varies quite a lot by area, and partly according to race/class in the very heavily Democratic area where I live. It’s not just a red state ‘freedom’ thing. It’s very obviously less closely followed in still predominantly Spanish speaking areas adjacent to the nowadays pretty yuppified area I live in, both right next to NY. This is showing up in infection stats also.
So on one hand an effort to get more uniform adherence to those protocols would not be directly banging its head against a partisan political wall. But OTOH it’s one of those cases where the upper middle class part of the Democratic party might tend to underestimate how differently they see various things than other parts of their party’s coalition. It also includes for example businesses which AFAIK are still not supposed to be open here in NJ but in certain areas you walk by them, and they are. The owners, workers and/or customers probably think there’s a pressing reason for this, rather than never having been told other people think they should not. I’m not sure having more public service communication is really going to change that, even though on the positive side these are not the segments of the population that instinctively want to do that opposite of whatever the ‘NY-centric left wing elite’ says they should.
Also on masks in particular I think the experts lost a good deal of credibility long saying (for various direct and indirect reasons) that masks didn’t matter much.
And finally we need to always consider how limited our quantitative knowledge of how this disease spreads still is. For example in I think today’s briefing Cuomo said that NYS had found 66% of recent new hospitalizations for COVID were of people who were ostensibly staying home. ‘Shocking’ he said relative to a previous expectation that a lot more would concentrated in ‘essential workers’ taking public transport, being in close quarters indoor with coworkers and customers for hours a day, etc. Part of this is obviously that people who stay home are older and have more preexisting conditions, but it could also be quiet non-political refusal to follow basic protocol in social contact with family and neighbors, especially in certain class, racial, ethnic, etc groups.
So some people are going to see the restrictions themselves as a political power play by ‘leftist elites’ (as they perceive it), and the more those elites are seen to push for those restrictions the more they push back (like a number of other issues). But a maybe bigger group just doesn’t listen to what they are told to do, in a less political way, not necessarily at all in a left v right way, but they still don’t listen.
“That sort of thing” being the “avoid crowds, stay home if you can”? Because that’s the weakest reference to social distancing possible. Plus, someone who is young and healthy would watch that PSA and could decide that he’s not at risk, because he’s not one of the groups mentioned.
The OP is asking for a PSA that specifically focuses on wearing masks and social distancing – do you think that will come from this administration?
I seem to recall that George W. Bush put his father and Bill Clinton in charge of a commission to raise funds for disaster relief after the 2004 tsunami. If we had a saner administration, I imagine they would be doing something similar, producing a PSA campaign featuring, say, Obama and George W. urging people to social distance and wear masks.
Here is another government PSA that specifically talks about social distancing; you might recognize the people in the video. Admittedly, it doesn’t mention mask wearing but I think that’s because it and the earlier one were produced before the message was for everyone to wear masks.
The GOP has spent the last decade or more telling people that scientists are all just ivory tower elitists who can’t be trusted in climate change or vaccines or medicine or whatever. The “ReOpen” campaigns are being funded by right-wing groups and are full of gun nuts and “states right” lunatics who care more about waving AR-15s at cops than what the CDC has to say. The president has scientific advisors who say the disease came from one place and then publicly ignores them and says that he thinks it must have come from Chinese labs and he’s, of course, always right about this stuff (doctors tell him all the time how much he just knows about medicine is amazing!). There’s no space for a “Bipartisan campaign” because one side of the aisle has spent over a decade demonizing science and saying that folksy common sense is just as good.
The fact that we need a bi-partisan non-political campaign about basic precautions is the reason we can’t have one. Because this administration has decided to make a partisan political issue out of it.
Any information campaign designed to tell people they should wear masks and avoid unnecessary gatherings will now have to go up against the President telling people they don’t have to listen and encouraging people to resist these instructions. And accusing the people who are giving out the information of making political attacks against him.
I’d say part of the problem is that a lot people are sceptical about if wearing masks does any good at all or if it’s more of a show that we’re doing ‘something.’ That includes me, btw.
The people protesting smoking laws and seatbelt laws were simply using the ‘my right, my freedom’ excuse. There’s overwhelming evidence in favor of not smoking and wearing seat belts.
The mandatory masks seem to have fallen into TSA category now. Many people think the liquids and shoe dance at airports are pointless security masquerade. We obey, grudgingly, because we don’t want some $12/hr TSA agent with delusions of Godhood make us miss our flight.
Mandatory masks seem like the compromise of we’ll let flights resume but now we’re gonna make security really strict. At least it may be of comfort as the security masquerade may have helped some people return to flying after being scared shitless after 9/11 and mandatory masks may help people start to think it’s ok and they can go to the store.
So, no, I don’t think some bipartisan campaign will help. I think most of are overwhelmed, confused, upset, and bombarded by news that seems to change every hour.