Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: Is this the messiest phase of the pandemic in America? Excerpt:
Much COVID coverage has continued to underscore the divide between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The focus on vaccine hesitancy has only grown in urgency.
“It’s almost like we need two kinds of newscasts, or two versions of the weather report,” Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, said on Sunday. “The forecast is pretty sunny for the vaccinated, but it’s quite bleak in some states for the unvaccinated.” As Stelter also noted, however, the pandemic is still a story of risk calculations, and “those nuances don’t always come through in the media coverage.”
The vaccinated are inevitably affected by such calculations, especially when, as with mask mandates, they are collective. And, in recent weeks, there has increasingly been media chatter about “breakthrough infections” that have occurred in fully vaccinated people, especially when those people have been famous.
A COVID outbreak among vaccinated New York Yankees players generated a welter of news stories, as did a case at the White House. Reporters peppered Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, with questions about the latter, and asked if she would commit to full transparency should there be more such cases in the future.
As coverage of breakthrough infections has increased, some commentators have argued, with ample justification, that it ought to decrease again. Such infections are neither common nor unexpected, and they almost always involve mild or asymptomatic illness; by hyping isolated cases, the argument goes, the press risks inducing undue worry among the vaccinated and undue skepticism among the unvaccinated.
A big part of the problem here is that data on breakthroughs is lacking, making it harder for reporters to properly contextualize anecdotal examples. The CDC once tracked all such infections, but in May, it narrowed its focus to breakthroughs that precede hospitalization or death—a move that the agency said would “help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance,” but which has also, undoubtedly, exacerbated uncertainty as to the scope of the problem, depriving the public of a centralized data source and leaving reporters and experts to instead pick over leaked CDC estimates and local tallies that aren’t standardized.
As Apoorva Mandavilli, a science reporter at the New York Times, pointed out yesterday on the paper’s Daily podcast, while most breakthrough infections are not individually serious, they can play a role in overall viral spread. Which brings the story right back ’round to the unvaccinated.
Breakthrough infections aren’t our only data blind spot at the moment. Recently, a number of states, including Nebraska and Florida, stopped reporting daily tallies of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and moved to weekly reporting instead. (As the AP’s Josh Funk writes, Nebraska briefly stopped all of its data reporting after the governor declared an end to the state’s health emergency, only to backtrack.)
“Doing this weekly report just leaves you completely in the dark about what’s going on,” Cindy Prins, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times. “And then on Friday, all of a sudden, like, boom, you get this surprise number.”
Nationally, daily COVID testing rates—which were arguably never high enough to provide a truly accurate picture of the state of the pandemic in the US—have declined substantially from their peak. Data collection and reporting can be labor-intensive, and it’s legitimate, of course, to debate where stretched health bureaucracies should direct their resources for maximum benefit in this new phase of the pandemic—but as I’ve written before, from a journalist’s point of view, the more data we have, the more reliable the picture of the world that we can build.
Meanwhile, there’s still a lot we don’t fully understand about the science of the virus, with new variants, in particular, proving confounding. “It’s a bit maddening, because it felt like we got to a point where we got to know this virus a little bit,” Mandavilli said yesterday on The Daily. “Delta has really changed that entire calculation. There are just so many more questions than I think we expected to have at this point. And it feels a little bit like an inflection point—another one—where the country could go in either direction.”
I agree. In fact, I’d make the case that this stage of the pandemic is the most complicated and uncertain that America has yet faced—not the worst, by any means, but perhaps the hardest for people, and the media, to get their heads around. The problems that bedeviled our early coverage of the pandemic—a lack of scientific certainty and consensus; inadequate data flows—are still problems, in ways new and infuriatingly unchanged. And the mitigation measures we had to cover back then—while never the beneficiaries of political consensus—were relatively blunt compared to the more subjective and situational risk calculations of this moment, which still very much apply, even as cases rise again. The vaccines are magnificent, but we still don’t know everything about them.
The situation differs substantially by place, and it can be hard to easily compare them. And it’s arguably more urgent than ever that Americans look out on the world, large swathes of which are desperately struggling right now.
