What We Pretend to Know About the Coronavirus Could Kill Us

Other than a vaccine or an extra 500,000 ventilators, tests and hospital beds, reliable information is the best weapon we have against Covid-19. It allows us to act uniformly and decisively to flatten the curve. In an ideal pandemic scenario, sound information is produced by experts and travels quickly to the public.

But we seem to be living in a nightmare scenario. The coronavirus emerged in the middle of a golden age for media manipulation. And it is stealthy, resilient and confounding to experts. It moves far faster than scientists can study it. What seems to be true today may be wrong tomorrow. Uncertainty abounds. And an array of dangerous misinformation, disinformation and flawed amateur analysis fills the void.

We’ve grown accustomed to living through an information war fought largely by hardened political operatives and trolls. But while the coronavirus crisis is political and will continue to be politicized, its most consequential fights will take place in the “fog of pandemic” where so much of our data — from health statistics to economic indicators — is flawed or evolving. Today’s propaganda could be tomorrow’s truth. Or vice versa. Even the good guys are working with limited information and hoping for the best. We are not prepared for what’s coming.

The best illustration of this challenge is the changing consensus and public messaging on wearing masks.

At the end of February, as the coronavirus was spreading in the United States, the surgeon general, Jerome Adams, argued that masks were not effective for the general public, tweeting, “STOP BUYING MASKS!”