The Best Paragraph I've Read:
Epidemiology is a science of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof. “Being approximately right most of the time is better than being precisely right occasionally,” the Scottish epidemiologist John Cowden wrote, in 2010. “You can only be sure when to act in retrospect.” Epidemiologists must persuade people to upend their lives—to forgo travel and socializing, to submit themselves to blood draws and immunization shots—even when there’s scant evidence that they’re directly at risk.
Epidemiologists also must learn how to maintain their persuasiveness even as their advice shifts. The recommendations that public-health professionals make at the beginning of an emergency—there’s no need to wear masks; children can’t become seriously ill—often change as hypotheses are disproved, new experiments occur, and a virus mutates.
This paragraph comes from the New Yorker. The article is titled: Seattle's Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York's Did Not.
Zac and Don discuss whether America could have taken a different path in fighting Covid-19. They discuss the challenges of persuading a skeptical population to take precautions against an enemy they cannot see. They wonder whether the rest of America could have followed the Seattle model of fighting the virus.
