Via the Miami New Times: CDC Issues Travel Warning for Miami Beach After Five Locally Transmitted Cases. Excerpt and then a comment:
Just 14 hours after Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine stood in front of reporters and said there was "no Zika outbreak in Miami Beach," Gov. Rick Scott announced in a press conference today that five locally transmitted Zika cases had been identified in the city's highest-traffic tourist area.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also issued a travel warning advising pregnant women to avoid Miami Beach.
Speaking at the Miami-Dade County Health Department headquarters, Scott said the cases had been transmitted in a 1.5-square-mile area stretching from Eighth to 28th Street, from the beach to the Intracoastal Waterway. That zone includes the majority of Ocean Drive, the city's famed Art Deco district, most of the barrier island's premier hotels, and many of Miami Beach's popular nightclubs.
During the conference, reporters accused Scott of muzzling doctors who wanted to speak to the public and of potentially downplaying the threat Zika posed to the city.
In a bizarre move, Scott then repeatedly refused to tell reporters when the first local transmission in Miami Beach had actually occurred and declined to tell the public how long the state had been aware cases were being transmitted in Miami Beach.
"It's a straightforward question," one reporter shouted at him.
Whatever the outbreak, whatever the disease, the local government resents it and tries to minimize the problem—not by getting rid of the outbreak's cause, but by controlling the message about it.
The Saudis' theory of message control is message suppression: They tell the world as little as possible about MERS, while threatening dire consequences for hospitals with slack infection control.
The Chinese theory is message delay: When H7N9 first appeared three years ago, we were bombarded with news stories and research papers. Then policy changed, and we now get reports on cases already weeks or months old. Well, old news is no news.
Venezuela just doesn't talk about Zika, or any other public health problem. I don't blame them, when they can do little or nothing about it.
Colombia's theory is more sophisticated: Every Saturday they publish detailed data on Zika, microcephaly, and Guillain-Barré cases, but they've declared the epidemic over. So Colombian media run very few Zika reports.
Another sophisticated approach: Don't have a ministry of health with an online presence at all, like Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and any number of other poor countries whose kleptocrats must scrape along to afford mansions on the Riviera.
Governor Rick Scott of Florida and Governor Dmitry Gobylkin of Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region in Siberia have a different approach: Take the initiative, issue news releases galore, and make them all highly positive.
Gobylkin, dealing with anthrax, has been quick to declare the outbreak suppressed and the reindeer herders not only recovered but happily resettled on clean tundra with vaccinated reindeer and new tents.
Scott, meanwhile, has consistently beaten his own health department to the punch, issuing his own news releases before Florida Health can publish the numbers. That way he can frame the situation and get the kind of news coverage he wants.
Yesterday, however, the strategy started to fail. Rumours were published about the likelihood of local transmission in Miami Beach. Those led to Mayor Levine's loud denials, which suggest he wasn't in the loop, or he was trying to smother the rumours until the governor reported the truth this morning.
I can well imagine that the rumours originated in Miami's healthcare specialists, who may indeed have considered themselves muzzled. If they leaked the Miami Beach story, they can easily leak more, like the time when the first Miami Beach Zika case was confirmed.
At that point Governor Scott will look like someone keeping secrets, someone not quite on the level. He can blame his staff, who should have told him that the screwup is never as bad as the coverup, which this begins to look like.
They should also have told him that by September no one will care—by then, local Zika transmission will be all over south Florida, and likely moving around the Gulf Coast as far as Houston. No one will remember, or care, when somebody in Miami Beach first caught Zika from a mosquito.
The basic principle of crisis communication is just nine words long:
Tell the truth.
Tell it often.
Tell it well.
And if you don't, with any luck your healthcare experts will do it for you.
