This is the last edition before the end of the U.S. electoral period. If you’re in the U.S., have you voted yet? It may not be the last one before we know its outcome.
🧀 The Emmental defence
This graphic has been doing the rounds lately. It’s not new, but many public health experts in Europe have felt the need to update it and share it widely (I wonder why). Better than any other, it explains how the various measures work together to keep us safe:
Some countries bet the house on masks and we saw how well that worked (Lockdown, Part II). Preventing such drastic measures requires governments to implement solid testing, tracing, and isolating, enforce quarantine, provide financial stimulus, and make pseudoscience-resistant policies. It also requires each of us to do our part.
How to use this: print it out, tape it your classrooms walls, your offices, your shops, your supermarkets. Act on what you can control and call your elected officials for everything else.
🩺 The public health approach to everything
More than just another helpful fact, I just wanted to talk about another way of thinking about some of the problems that plague us.
France experienced two violent attacks within two weeks. The reaction was the usual one: we won’t abandon our values, we won’t negotiate with terrorists, minutes of silence, security, police, repression.
These attacks have been happening more and more frequently. On September 25, a guy attacked two people in front of the Charlie Hebdo offices. Before then, there were two attacks in January and two in April. That’s just 2020. Since 2015, we’ve averaged five attacks a year, with fatalities ranging from 0 to 130. It’s not improving. At what point do we take note of the fact that what we’re doing isn't helping?
No one has the answer, but I knew, from reading about gun violence in the U.S., that public health experts think about violence as an epidemic. It spreads amongst people the way a virus would. Just like lifestyle diseases obesity and cholesterol, factors that are social, economic and environmental can make it communicable. So I wondered if extremism that leads to violence could be thought of in the same way. And sure enough:
(…) primary and community-level intervention programs that seek to prevent radicalization among members of the general public or among members of specific communities that extremists are thought to target for recruitment are increasingly relying upon a public health model. This policy shift occurred because of the public health model's success in other fields, as well as unhappiness with previous CVE programs that were thought to stigmatize, profile, and undermine trust within certain communities, such as those of Muslim Americans.
The logic is the same: if you prevent, you don’t have to cure. You needn’t slack on the security response, but what if we frontloaded the work? There isn’t much literature about how well these programmes work yet. Still, it’s a good guess. We know this approach has helped in other areas.
How to use this: frankly, this was more of a question. Can our societies shift perspectives so we can be more proactive? Whether it’s Europe with radical Islamic terrorism or the U.S. with domestic white nationalistic terrorism, can we work harder to prevent this sort of ideological violence?
🦇 Learning from bats
Sick bats don’t wait for public health institutes to tell them to isolate, they do it naturally. Researchers at Ohio State University injected some bats with an agent that activated their immune systems and others with a placebo, then they gave them tiny backpacks to follow their every move:
Compared to control bats in their hollow-tree home, sick bats interacted with fewer bats, spent less time near others and were overall less interactive with individuals that were well-connected with others in the roost.
Healthy bats were also less likely to associate with a sick bat, the data showed.
That’s a good thing.
We all have so much pressure to get up, head to work, go to school, interact with others, we all feel we need to show up and be productive, but the fact is, in doing this, we make things more costly in every respect.
How to use this: when social animals feel ill and want to be left alone, it’s helpful to their communities. You’re a social animal. When you’re ill and all you want is to stay in bed and watch bad series, you should be able to stay in bed and watch bad series. In fact, the rest of us should thank you for it.
This also stands to reason, but if Covid-19 has shown us anything, it’s that any system that doesn’t impose paid sick days requires immediate reform. It’s worth reminding our employers and elected officials of the fact that it costs more to let sick employees come to work than it does to pay them for staying home when ill.
👀 Form meets function for everyone’s enlightenment
Speaking of never relying on any one measure, this visual effort by Spanish newspaper El País is extraordinary in its simplicity and clarity. In any health crisis, simplicity and clarity are key — governments everywhere might want to take note.
Click through for the whole thing, but for a quick preview, I’ve recorded a video of the mobile experience:
Aquí está en su versión original, para compartir.
"Whether it’s Europe with radical Islamic terrorism or the U.S. with domestic white nationalistic terrorism, can we work harder to prevent this sort of ideological violence?"
I think, Europe definitely _also_ has a growing white nationalistic terrorism problem. In Germany alone we had 3 massive white nationalist terror attacks between 2019 and 2020: Halle (Yom Kippur Attack), Hanau (Attack on Migrant Businesses) and Kassel (murder of pro-refugee district president). There have been at least three cases of police precincts and one special forces group which were connected to white nationalist terrorism.
2018 a Lega Nord member shot six African migrants in Italy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macerata_shooting).
2017 Swedish neo-nazis bombed two refugee centres in and around Gothenburg (https://eurojewcong.org/news/communities-news/sweden/swedish-neo-nazis-jailed-over-bomb-attacks-on-refugee-centres/).
Radical Islam is of course horrible and a serious problem but it's not the only significant terrorism threat facing the continent.