‘Facts tell, stories sell,’ according to the advertising maxim. Leaving the question of whether an advertising maxim should have anything to do with news or journalism, clearly in contemporary times, it does. In recent Irish history, for example, we can trace the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the long-running campaign by activists to tell sympathetic and unquestioning talk show hosts their sad tales of traveling for terminations.
While being subjected to such narratives, each person must remember to question whether there is another side of the story. Were radio and television presenters as interested in pro-life stories, such as when a child who had been given a terminal diagnosis before birth was born perfectly healthy? They rarely were interested, and they tried their best to stifle the truly tragic post-repeal case of a healthy baby who was aborted after a misdiagnosis in an Irish hospital. And did many abortions fall under the ‘sad’ categories, or were any done for convenience?
With coronavirus, in order to ‘sell’ restrictions to us, we are told many human interest stories, little stories. I call them ‘little’ because they may be true, but at times they obscure or crowd out the bigger story. The formerly healthy people who, while over the worst symptoms, are left with the nebulous ‘long Covid,’ have been given journalistic attention. We have heard about Covid deniers who posted to social media about how they went to large gatherings or refused to wear masks, only to die of Covid shortly afterward. The healthcare workers who are horrified, exhausted, and burnt out have been given plenty of coverage. These are all situations, we are given to believe, which demonstrate why restrictions must be so harsh.
It is vital, though, that we question whether there is an untold angle to these stories, or facts which are not being presented. We seldom hear about the average Covid death, which is of an elderly person, often in a care home. Such a death is very important to the family and friends of the deceased, and the fact of the death buttresses statistics reported on RTÉ each evening—yet such stories are deemed unworthy of recounting in detail. Why is that? Is it because, despite locking down young and healthy people in the name of protecting the elderly, governments and health officials internationally have signally failed to protect the elderly in care homes and hospitals? In other words, because these people would have died whether we were allowed to travel more than 5km or not?
As a thought experiment against the little Covid stories, consider influenza seasons of each recent year, in which hundreds of Irish people died and many more became seriously ill. Did an Irish outlet ever publish a story about Séamus, who decided to go to a livestock mart despite his wife’s having a bad cough, and then passed on the flu to Hugh, who subsequently died of the flu? What about young, feverish Kate’s decision to fly home from skiing in the Alps, where she sat next to vulnerable Declan, whose flu turned into a terrible case of pneumonia?
If we were not told these stories then, why are we being told Covid stories now?
One of the reasons is that contact tracing—which would reveal that Kate sat next to Declan on the aeroplane or that Séamus and Hugh had a chat—was ruled out by the WHO in a 2019 paper as a technique for dealing with the flu even under the worst pandemic conditions. Incidentally, quarantine of exposed individuals (as opposed to sick individuals) and internal travel restrictions were also not recommended for influenza pandemics.*
Until I researched this article, I had not stopped to think about contact tracing and the flu. Yet each person who died of the flu is as dead as each person who died of Covid. The difference is that some of the deaths took place in the context of months of unrelenting scrutiny of each asymptomatic person’s tiniest movement, and criminal penalties against previously unthinkable infractions, such as visiting a beach; while the other deaths were treated as being as seasonal and as predictable as the falling of leaves from a tree. It would make one wonder what bigger picture we are missing when we are caught up in a narrative of little stories.
*Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza 9789241516839-eng.pdf (who.int)
Jennifer Mooney writes from rural Donegal