Simply put, overreaction tends to ruin things. For example, overreacting about a bad grace can force one to overthink and ruin a day. Overreacting causes unnecessary anxiety, fights, and danger and imposes great uneasiness and tension. The mysterious new strand of the flu, the H1N1 strain, dives into the unknown, also causing uneasiness and anxiety amongst health agencies. Nobody knows how seriously to handle H1N1. Health agencies could underestimate the strand and wind up with a catastrophe, or could overestimate the strand and invoke fear and implement unnecessary emergency procedures. Ultimately, overreaction to the H1N1 strain of the flu causes more danger than complacency because it causes unnecessary disruption and angst.
One of the scariest things in the world is being left in the dark - not literally, but figuratively. Being stuck in a position where you don’t know what is going to happen next is terrifying, yet sometimes there is nothing that can fix it. This is how health agencies felt for months leading up to and during this outbreak of the H1N1 strain of the flu, more commonly known as the swine flu. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) spent hours upon hours studying the virus, previous flu trends, and anything they could get their hands on to help them predict anything about this mystery swine flu. Alas, the virus broke out rapidly and these health agencies still had no answers for the general public about the future of the strain.
The biggest problem that these health agencies had in response to this outbreak was to keep calm and not overreact to the potential dangers of H1N1 because of the overwhelming consequences of overreacting. Think about it: if there is one thing that comes naturally, it’s overreacting when left ignorant about something. Coming up with a “worst case scenario” is very common and usually consists of major overreactions. More often than not, the solution is never as bad as the worst case scenario would have you believe. WHO and CDC had to keep calm in order to not let society go into “worst case scenario” mode. After all, it was one hundred percent possible that the threat could be over as quickly as it had arisen. The author of the article that my argument is based off of even states that though a media backlash on the virus had begun, “most cases have been mild (...) if the agencies alert people and the pandemic fizzles out, they will be accused of hyping the threat and causing unnecessary angst [in society].” Hyping the threat will cause unnecessary stress and will cause larger problems than just a flu outbreak.
Downplaying the potential threat may seem like it would cause problems too, but the problems that underplaying the virus would cause are nowhere near as large as the problems that overhyping it would cause. In August 2010, only a little over a year after the H1N1 strain was labeled a pandemic (which is a rapidly spread illness affecting a large area such as an entire continent), it had already
regressed several levels down to seasonal-like virus. It did not take long at all to move from a level 5 pandemic to a level that isn’t even on the scale anymore. H1N1 was no longer considered any more threatening than the regular flu or the common cold for which we have no cure. By the time the health agencies had time to communicate the dangers of the situation to everyone, the dangers wouldn’t even last long enough for them to be relevant. They would be accused of overhyping the risks and prolonging unnecessary fear into everyone. Imagine if health agencies issued major health threats at the beginning of every flu season. Sure, when the virus is new and unknown, these threats should be relayed, but considering the short amount of time it took for H1N1 to die down to “non-threatening,” its a good thing health agencies like WHO and the CDC did not overreact while communicating the risks. Overreacting would have ensued superfluous anxiety everywhere, which could have resulted in even more illness and bigger problems.
Complacency is what we need these health agencies to advertise. They should communicate the risks but not overreact about them. At an early stage, the consequences of a pandemic are so uncertain that communicating the risks is a delicate matter and one that can easily blow up unintentionally. Members of the Emergency Committee in the US Department of Health and Human Services have declared that while the virus will continue to circulate, the intensity has decreased dramatically due to normal prevention measures - nothing over the top - and has already begun to take on characteristics of the normal seasonal flu. Nothing out of the ordinary requiring large prevention measures had to be done to contain this new strain of the virus. Once a vaccine was created and distributed - admittedly a little less-than-ideally available - the virus was contained and nothing abnormal needed to be done.
CBS News made it very clear that no one needed to overreact in any way about the swine flu; three months into the declared pandemic, only one US citizen had lost their life to the disease versus the fact that the regular flu takes about one hundred lives a day during flu season. CNN’s John Roberts sarcastically posed the question, “Is this really the killer virus that we’ve all been fearing for decades?” At one point, the swine flu took up almost 50% of airtime on network news. The more airtime the swine flu got on the news, the more likely citizens (especially those who did not stay educated about the virus) would be to freak out exorbitantly.
The author of the Nature article “Between a Virus and a Hard Place” states that “the risk is not hyping the pandemic threat, but underplaying it.” In fact, quite the opposite is true - the risk is definitely overhyping the threat of H1N1. Overreacting and becoming distressed unnecessarily is unnerving and causes nothing but conflict in society and is much more dangerous than remaining unruffled about the risks of this new virus. The longer that health agencies remain calm and collected, the more time they will have to learn about the virus and potential vaccine options. They must hope for the best in terms of how serious the outbreak gets, rather than cause a ruckus and seem alarmed. As any college student knows, stress only leads to sickness and overreacting would be the direct cause of stress. The stress would be even worse and even less worthwhile if it faded away quickly because the overreaction was unnecessary. For this reason, overreaction, not complacency, is the greatest danger posed by the new H1N1 strain of the flu.
Hey hey science blog readers, my name is Dustin Kavanaugh and I currently am a first year Computer Science and Statistics major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I attended the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics for two years, where I gained experience in Laboratory Sciences (dissected a bunch of stinky animals and blew things up). Although I am currently majoring in Computer Science and Statistics, I am also interested in Astrophysics and Astronomy. I enjoy reading about and discussing how Scientific theories and Religion can coexist and complement each other (or contradict). Although I work out daily, I counteract the benefits of exercising with lots of junk food and little sleep. My passion for science and curiosity for health in college inspire my discussions on this blog. I likes bugs, too.
