![]() The Chinese continually stalled WHO teams trying to gather information on the pandemic it was not until the last week of January that Chinese health officials told the WHO the reason for their stonewalling. Even as China’s top health official warned the Chinese health system to prepare for the “most severe challenge since SARS in 2003” and ordered the Chinese CDC to declare the highest emergency level possible, public-facing officials were still reporting that the likelihood of sustained transmission between humans was low. Similar concerns prompted China’s National Health Commission to issue a confidential notice forbidding labs that had sequenced the new virus to publish their data without government authorization. “ they said we still can’t wear protective clothing, because it might stir up panic.” “When we first discovered it could be transmitted between people, our hospital head, chairman, medical affairs department, they sat and made endless calls to the city government, the health commission,” wrote one Wuhan nurse in January of 2020. They feared what might happen if normal citizens became aware of the disease. ![]() There, provincial and municipal officials muzzled early warnings of a novel respiratory illness from doctors, virologists, and health officials. The pattern was set early in Wuhan, China. Over the last year, we have seen the consequences of prioritizing panic prevention over disaster response in one country after another. This understanding of disaster is not limited to Hollywood blockbusters. Disaster management is thus, at its core, a problem of narrative control. ![]() Normal citizens who understand the danger they are in will pose a threat to everyone else in calamity’s path. The lesson is clear: the key to disaster response is ensuring the public does not feel fear. Society descends into a Hobbesian scramble for resources or open riot against the powers that be. If they fail, audiences get to see images of an unnerved public up close. They race to solve the problem as covertly as possible to do otherwise would invite a panic more disastrous than the disaster itself. Experts discover a looming catastrophe of incredible proportions. The story beats charted out in the 1950 film Panic in the Streets have been repeated in every disaster film that has followed it. The title of the film reveals what he fears will occur if the public discovers the truth: Panic in the Streets. The citizens of New Orleans must be kept in the dark. But the local public health officer-the hero of this story-begs the mayor not to go public with the news. At a crisis meeting of the city council, one councilor argues that the only way to save the city is to announce to the public what has happened and seek their cooperation. ![]() The city authorities now have 48 hours to find and inoculate every person who came in contact with the man before his death or New Orleans will become the epicenter of a terrible epidemic. ![]() The corpse is infected with the pneumonic plague. The coroner who examines him realizes something terrifying: this nameless man died sick. A dead body floats along the New Orleans waterfront. ![]()
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