Famously, in the US, the Vietnam War became unpopular as the media showed Americans dying in jungles and showed their caskets coming back from the war.
In Vietnam we lost around 50,000 soldiers. Depending how you want to count it that war lasted 20 years.
As of this writing the US has over 260,000 deaths. That is in less than one year.
Yet we had a huge societal upheaval over a fraction of those deaths.
When considering why the answer I came up with is the media played up the deaths in Vietnam. Pictures of the war, caskets coming home and so on.
But we see none of that with COVID. Wondering why idiots keep ignoring it is that they never see it. To many it is a conspiracy. There are some stories of hospitals overwhelmed and morgue trucks (refrigerated trucks) to have the dead piled in…
…but we never see that.
I am not keen on seeing the gruesome details but that is what stopped a war with a minor fraction of where we are now. It seems to me if we want to stop this we need to show the horror.
Show the overwhelmed hospitals
Show the people dying and gasping their last breaths
Show the trucks…literal trucks…carting the dead away
Sure we have seen a few articles but for most I think it is all a remote problem. Something that happens to other people.
I know it sounds gruesome but I think the horror of it all needs to be driven home.
The media landscape now is drastically different compared to the Vietnam era. The phenomenon of modern news was anticipated by the 1976 movie Network, which saw that for-profit journalism would create ratings-chasing programming that shows the audience what it wants to see, and voluntarily quashes what the audience rejects. (We look at Network now, and we wonder what the big deal is; but at the time, it seemed like outright science fiction.)
By contrast, during Vietnam, there were three networks delivering national news. One of the news teams was anchored by America’s Most Trusted Newsman Walter Cronkite. If he said it, we all accepted it. We had a shared reality. We did not agree on our philosophies, and we only loosely agreed on our goals, but we all agreed on our facts.
We are now in a world where if you don’t like the facts on offer from one news outlet, you are free to choose another news outlet that offers you not just a different perspective but an entirely alternative set of baseline facts. And if any one outlet’s facts become too awful or distressing, the audience will flee from it. So there is incentive, for all parties, to cater to viewer preferences by minimizing unpleasantness and discomfort.
“But,” you might say, “some people know the pandemic is terrible, they don’t deny those facts, wouldn’t some news sources be willing to engage with the horrific reality of mass graves and refrigerated trucks stacked with corpses?” Yes to the first part, but the second part does not logically follow. Some people are, indeed, accepting of the heartbreaking truth of this international crisis, but do they really want to see the rows of cadavers on ice? What does it benefit them to see that? They already accept the truth; what would seeing the viscerally morbid pictures change for them? The people who need to see this information can choose not to see it. Therefore, nobody shows it.
The gulf between modern news, and the news of Cronkite’s time where unpleasant reality could not be avoided and had to be consciously dealt with, is difficult to overstate.
Quite apart from the patient privacy issues (which are considerable), I don’t think this would have quite the effect on public opinion that you think it would. Some people are motivated effectively by fear. Those people are already doing more or less what you probably want them to do. Some people, however, have exactly the opposite reaction to fear-based messaging – either out of machismo, or because they see it as manipulative – and those people are not going to be motivated by even more of it.
Also, the Vietnam War isn’t a great analogy. The Vietnam War was a human-caused disaster that humans had the power to end, and “making it unpopular” was an effective way to make it end sooner. The pandemic is already unpopular. The problem is that until an effective vaccine can be approved and distributed (hopefully soon!), people have only a very limited set of tools to slow it down, and the use of most of those tools (masks excepted, those are basically free) has a great and increasing set of societal costs, and people can legitimately disagree both about how effective those tools are, and to what extent they are worth the costs. There’s an actual conversation to be had here, although I’m not especially sanguine about our society’s ability to have it. But, in any case, I don’t think emotional appeals of any sort help us get there – they mostly just entrench people in the camps they’re already in.
I think people are aware of how deadly COVID is; they just don’t think it’ll happen to them. In reality, COVID isn’t super deadly, but it is a full-on assault on the body that causes extensive and intensive medical care. The sheer volume of extended hospitalization could break the healthcare system, and then people from New York to Anytown, USA would have a very serious problem on their hands. That is what the big danger is between now and March.
I think airing testimonials from COVID long haulers would be more effective than showing dead bodies. People tend to take a cavalier attitudes towards death. “If I die from having Thanksgiving dinner with my family, then I guess I was meant to die.” Or, “I’d rather die happy than live bored and lonely.” But maybe if they were exposed to stories of young and middle-aged people who are stuck in the limbo of chronic fatigue for months on end, they would realize what’s really at stake here.
I think people who previously were COVID deniers/downplayers but who now see the light due to their own misfortune would be able to provide the most effective testimonials. The people who won’t listen to Dr. Fauci might be swayed by Bubba in the trucker’s cap, speaking passionately if not eloquently in Appalachian-inflected English. Not all of them, of course. But many of them might.
Mainstream news outlets have been doing this, all along. I’ve seen so many interviews with doctors and nurses who treat COVID patients, video of what it actually looks like inside a COVID ward, and interviews with people who have recovered (or the families of those who have died).
The issue is that it’s the mainstream outlets doing this. The people who are in the greatest need to be swayed are, IMO, in two groups:
Conservatives who have let themselves become convinced that the mainstream media are horrible, lying, peddlers of fake news, and have a purely political agenda. They believe that the only trustworthy outlets are ones like Fox News, Newsmax, etc., as well as what Trump himself says.
Low-information people, who never watch the news, and choose to not be informed – not just about COVID, but anything. (I have relatives who fall into this camp.)
I don’t think anything short of an extensive campaign from the conservative news outlets can change the minds and behavior of the first group, and even then, I’m skeptical it would work. I have no idea how to reach the second group, short of them seeing a loved one suffer and die from the disease.
I don’t watch much broadcast TV, but I do watch a lot of streaming content, like Youtube. During the election campaign season, it seemed like I was bombarded by negative political ads every five minutes. But I haven’t been bombarded with any PSA’s about COVID. I’d love to see ads showing local hospital capacity followed by a message to wear a mask, avoid large gatherings, and socially distance. And they could air COVID testimonials just like they air commercial testimonials, but I don’t see them doing this.
I’ve seen a lot of PSAs from the CDC, about wearing masks, etc. Granted, those have not had the sort of content you’re suggesting, and as I think about it, I don’t know how many that I’ve seen recently, but there’s been a campaign.
Part of the issue with PSAs, as I understand it, is that networks and stations can’t be forced to run PSAs at certain times – you rarely see PSAs run during prime time, for example, because the ad space is too expensive. So, you typically see PSAs late at night, during daytime, etc.
I think people see the dead as mostly old, brown, or unhealthy, and so don’t identify with them because even if they fit into one of those three categories, they can tell themselves they are okay because they aren’t the other two.
I also think people are conflating stats about nursing home deaths with stats about people over 65. So they look at the over 65 stats and sorta assume those were all nursing home deaths. But lots of those people were not on deaths door, had 10 or 20 great years taken away from them.
We’ve had 50k deaths of people under 65, and 100k under 75. Those are shocking, horrific numbers, but somehow they are diluted but the 150k among those over 75. We don’t care about the 150k because it’s all old fucks, and we don’t care about the 50k because it’s not many compared to the 150k.
My sister knows all the head facts about it, but insists on going to the gym 3-4x a week as before, still flying around the nation and inviting our long-distance cousins to visit. Some people simply cannot accept a stop or major disruption to their lifestyle, no matter how serious the threat.
Doubtless we can point to some and say they had one foot in the grave already but with 260,000+ dead so far (and counting) you can lay an alarming number of the dead outside of grandma and grandpa.
And that weirdly assumes it isn’t so bad if grandma and grandpa shuffle off this mortal coil.
If you (general “you”) are a bit lucky you will be in your 70s-80s someday. I invite you to consider how ok you would be with society deciding you dying is kinda ok.
After reading responses (so far) in this thread (which have been very good) I am still of the opinion that there needs to be a channel (be it YouTube or better, news networks) showing the tragedy that is happening in hospitals around the country. Blur peoples faces for anonymity.
No doubt many will not watch or think what they are watching is a lie. Many will never see it. But some will. And some minds will be changed. Maybe not a whole lot but some.
I think it is worth doing and we are missing an opportunity to serve as a chronicle for future generations.
I don’t think I found anywhere in your OP where you described exactly what effect you hoped the idea would have – effect on the virus itself, I mean. In other words, what do you see as the benefit of ‘driving it close to home’? I feel like you’re skipping some pretty important steps, in your logical flow. (If you think it’s as simple as that, anyway.)
I feel like you should also address the matter of what to do about the significant number of people who have already had it and recovered from it. And the people those people know. And the public figures who have done the same. (For that matter, as we now approach a year into this thing, do we still not have a single death, or at least a surprising one, from a highly notable public figure? That is…remarkable.) If you think a media campaign would drive a certain message home, what message do you think all those things are driving home? And how to get around that?
This disease, unfortunately, isn’t gruesome enough. Respiratory deaths don’t scare people. If it were a bleeding-gallons-of-blood-out-of-every-orifice virus, things would be different.
260,000 dead sounds like a lot, until you compare it to the ten times that many who die from old age. How much alarm do you see raised over that much larger number? Fact is, society decided long ago (like, the dawn of history long ago, at least) that it wasn’t so bad if Grandma and Grandpa shuffle off this mortal coil, and that old people dying is OK.