The biggest coincidence of my career

Why we struggle to grasp how bad events will be

Just under five years ago, I encountered arguably the biggest coincidence of my career. On the 29th of February 2020, the UK reported the first locally acquired case of COVID-19. The case had appeared in a commuter town called Haslemere a few miles southeast of London. It meant that COVID had already been spreading undetected in the UK.

But it wasn’t just the case that caught my attention. It was also the location.

The reason was some research we’d done three years earlier. In collaboration with the BBC, we had run a large citizen science project to study social mixing patterns in the UK. The aim was to provide data that would be useful in the event of another pandemic. Alongside the data collection part of the study in 2017, there was also a 2018 TV show exploring how a pandemic might develop if it started with a case imported from abroad, before spreading within the UK.

Because the show required an epidemic simulation, we had to choose somewhere in the UK for the outbreak to start - and hence somewhere to collect detailed data on social interactions early in the epidemic. We settled on a small town just outside London. We thought it was the sort of place where it was plausible we might see an outbreak randomly start before spreading into the city.

The name of the town was Haslemere.

A couple of days after I heard about the new COVID case in Haslemere, I was invited to appear on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme alongside Hannah Fry, who’d presented the 2018 show. We were there to discuss the BBC study, as well as the current COVID situation and how the data were now being used¹.

As part of the interview, they played a clip from that earlier TV show. And, sitting there, it was striking just how, well, jaunty the 2018 clip was. It started with light background music, before recounting some background and the implications: there might be another pandemic, and that’s why the show was looking at social interactions. More light music. The tone was starkly different to the emerging reports we would see about COVID – and the reports that we would continue to see throughout the current year. Pre-COVID, the idea of another 1918-like pandemic had often been surreal and intangible, like a history lesson. Now it was very, horribly real.

I’ve thought a lot about that moment watching recent coverage of events in the US. Without doubt, we are entering a new era. The US Constitution has been ignored, agencies have been ransacked, and sensitive computer systems have been meddled with. Meanwhile, journalists at supposedly serious outlets have been dressing themselves up as Trump, calling his announcements ‘tantalising’, or summarising recent chaos with euphemisms like ‘blowing through apparent legal limits, often with no clear public explanation for how their actions could be consistent with the rule of law’.

There are echoes of the early days of COVID in all of this. Both before and after the pandemic emerged, there was widespread reluctance to acknowledge the reality of such a crisis. Well into March 2020, people hesitated to call it a ‘pandemic’ or admit that the world was already in a dire situation. Even after countries had endured devastating first waves, discussion about the future seemed detached from reality, as if people simply couldn’t picture a second wave – despite overwhelming evidence from the months prior.

Similarly, it now feels like many journalists and public figures struggle to grasp that something new and disastrous is unfolding in the US. In many cases, I suspect this reluctance stems from an inability – or unwillingness – to face the reality of what’s happening. No one wants to be the outlier who disrupts the collective worldview. (Speaking from experience, I found myself playing this uncomfortable role in several interviews during the spring of 2020.)

One of the biggest challenges, both during COVID and now, is status quo bias: the tendency to prefer that the existing state of affairs continue rather than change. But COVID and the US situation both represent a crucial variant of this bias, where the status quo has already collapsed, but people still act as if it remains intact. Because individuals haven’t fully processed this shift, they default to inaction, clinging to the belief that things will return to ‘normal’ instead of recognising that a fundamental change has already occurred.

I remember having several discussions with journalists in early 2020, when they said a particular strategy was a terrible idea. Perhaps it would be damaging to health, damaging to liberty, or damaging to privacy. They were often right about the downsides. But the problem was that the correct comparator was no longer normal pre-COVID life. The alternative was another flawed strategy, meaning countries would have to make extremely difficult choices, and soon.

Complacency and fatalism

It’s not just about ignoring reality. There’s also a tension between complacency and fatalism. Some may hesitate to acknowledge that a crisis is already unfolding because they fear it will encourage a sense of inevitability. After all, if you say a new outbreak will become a pandemic, you are effectively saying it won’t be controlled. If you say the US is doomed, you are suggesting that nobody will save it.

There were some who warned of a COVID disaster in early 2020 – and are now keen to claim credit for their foresight. But such predictive statements, in themselves, are not necessarily that useful. The world did have opportunities to act. Ironically, many of the same voices who insisted the catastrophe was inevitable are also those who insisted that the pandemic could have been stopped.

Which brings us to the problem of complacency. If we say something is controllable – whether a virus or power grab – we risk implying that there is nothing to worry about. But I think that COVID showed the world a useful lesson in this regard. The countries that did well were neither complacent nor fatalistic. They treated the threat as very real, even it meant being an outlier in their words and actions. And they took action to get ahead of the problem. They communicated clearly what was happening, and the difficult decisions required to address it.

The US was among the worst at grasping the threat of COVID when it emerged just over five years ago. Now, faced with a new threat of a runaway presidency, many journalists and public figures seem poised to make the same errors again.

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If you’re interested in real-time evidence and how people process it, my new book Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty is available to pre-order now.

Cover image: Stefano Zocca

1. The BBC data also helped provide part of the evidence base for testing and contact tracing in the UK, because it had created a detailed benchmark about what ‘normal’ looked like pre-COVID.