I think this mattered in March, but the visibility of COVID-19 is pretty much maxed out at this point and has been awhile.
As a heuristic, if something is object-level bad, with the silver lining that it would make people take a problem more seriously if it happened… then it’s bad overall. This is not an ironclad law of nature, but it’s usually true, and short-circuits some of the worst failure modes of political reasoning.
I think this mattered in March, but the visibility of COVID-19 is pretty much maxed out at this point and has been awhile.
As a heuristic, if something is object-level bad, with the silver lining that it would make people take a problem more seriously if it happened… then it’s bad overall. This is not an ironclad law of nature, but it’s usually true, and short-circuits some of the worst failure modes of political reasoning.