Page - 209 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

209The Media Paradox and the COVID-19 Pandemic Not being knowledgeable in things scientific, the media reported gloomy, even apocalyptic, projections without asking skeptical ques- tions. The media may thereby have contributed to public misun- derstanding of the seriousness of the outbreak. That COVID-19 was literally deadly serious all right, with a dispiriting ability to be trans- mitted easily; that it would reach the infection and death levels pro- jected in worst-case scenarios would have presumed failure in policy by governments and lack of fidelity to proposed measures by citizens. Neither occurred. Early studies of COVID-19’s infection rates and possible death totals, including an influential one from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team in Britain, produced alarmist projections, including its “best-case” scenario, wherein even if Britain took all possible restrain- ing measures the National Health System (NHS) would be “over- whelmed.” (The study projected that by the second week of April, the NHS would need 30 times the available number of beds. Instead, the NHS has had plenty of empty beds.) Short of these measures, the Imperial College study suggested that perhaps 500,000 Britons and 2.2 million Americans would die.11 The same sort of early, ugly sce- narios appeared in Canadian reports. Anticipated “surges” caused hospitals to move patients to other facilities and clear operating rooms that, as things turned out, were not needed for COVID-19 patients. The patients who suffered from idle beds were those for whom opera- tions for other medical problems had been delayed—delays of the sort that plague the Canadian health care system according to various international, comparative studies. The British Columbia government acknowledged, for example, that before the COVID-19 crisis 90,000 patients had been awaiting surgery.12 Given the rush of events, the uncertainty of the virus’s trajectory, the cascading effects on the economy (that is, on the lives of millions of people), the dwindling of reportorial resources, and the interna- tional dimensions of the crisis, the media performed as well as could 11. Neil Ferguson et al, “Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) to Reduce COVID19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand” (16 March 2020), online (pdf): Imperial  College  COVID-19  Response  Team  <www.imperial.ac.uk/ media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College- COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf>. 12. Kelly Grant & Justine Hunter, “Provinces Face Big Backlogs as They Resume Elective Operations”, The  Globe  and  Mail (7 May 2020), online: <www. theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-provinces-face-big-backlogs-as-they- resume-elective-surgeries>.