Why We Underestimated COVID-19, and DJ D-Nice’s Club Quarantine

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Despite the warnings of politicians and health-care professionals, many have failed to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a serious threat: the spring breakers on beaches, the crowds in city parks. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning expert on human behavior, speaks with Maria Konnikova about why the threat posed by COVID-19 defies intuitive comprehension. “There should be clear guidelines and clear instructions. We all ought to know whether we should open our Amazon packages outside the door or bring them in,” Kahneman said. “It’s not a decision individuals should consider making on the basis of what they know, because they don’t know enough to make it.” Plus: the story of a nine-hour virtual party that attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees—including Rihanna, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Drake.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.0	Outside of emergency rooms, it seems like many of us fail to understand this pandemic in real time, to understand the seriousness of it,
0:22.8	the appalling fatality. Now, I'm not talking about the cynical disinformation that was spread
0:27.7	by the president and his media allies. What I mean here is the spring breakers who seemed so
0:33.1	oblivious to what was going on and continued partying on beaches. I'm talking about the way that
0:39.2	there were crowded city parks and crowded restaurants and bars, even as the death toll began to soar.
0:46.2	Even elected officials, leaders at all levels of government, struggled to respond to the virus in a way
0:51.4	that reflected just how serious the problem actually was and is.
0:57.1	How and why people misunderstand and make mistakes is the life's work of Daniel Conneman,
1:02.5	a scholar whose work revolutionized the field of cognitive psychology. He's a winner of the Nobel
1:07.6	Prize and the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, a bestseller about human behavior.
1:13.2	Maria Konnikova, who's written for The New Yorker about psychology and many other subjects, spoke to Daniel Kahneman last week.
1:20.9	This is an exponential event.
1:24.3	That is, we see things doubling every two days, every three days, every four days.
1:30.7	And people don't, and certainly including myself, don't seem to be able to think straight
1:36.2	about exponential growth. So I was, I knew that there were 100 cases in France, and I was about to fly to France.
1:46.1	I also knew that epidemics are exponential.
1:49.7	I didn't even consider the fact that if the rate of infections doubles every three days,
1:56.5	then in a month it will be increased by a factor of 1,000.
2:01.6	And what we see today are infections that occurred two or three weeks ago.
2:06.6	And the deaths today are people who got infected four, five weeks ago.
	...

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