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Narratives are the most powerful tools of our age. Each week, I deconstruct the dominant ones behind the success or failure of businesses, leaders and governments
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Good Morning Dear Reader,
The Ken’s co-founder and CEO Rohin recently made a point about narratives that has stuck with me. Audiences are more important than both the story and the storyteller.
It is how audiences perceive the story that matters—more than the intention of the storyteller or how well researched and structured the story is.
In other words, audience > storyteller > story.
Let me give you an example.
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If you can read the above paragraph, you know what I am talking about.
Over the last few weeks, a narrative that the Omicron variant of Covid-19 is ‘mild’ has gained ground across the globe. No significant authority on the pandemic has ever called it mild, but that is what a significant part of the world’s population heard.
Let's unpack the journey of this optimistic story today.
(Also, I know Inciting Incident has been leaning into stories around the pandemic over the last few weeks. That will change from the next edition, I promise.)
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Is Omicron mild? Depends on the storyteller and the audience
On 10 January, American magazine The Atlantic published a piece with this headline:
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Here’s an excerpt from that story.
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A flurry of reports has encouraged a relatively rosy view of the variant, compared with some of its predecessors. Omicron appears to somewhat spare the lungs. Infected laboratory mice and hamsters seem to handily fight it off. Proportionally, fewer of the people who catch it wind up hospitalized or dead. All of this has allowed a deceptively reassuring narrative to take root and grow: Omicron is mild. The variant is docile, harmless, the cause of an #Omicold that’s no worse than a fleeting flu. It is so trivial, some have argued, that the world should simply “allow this mild infection to circulate,” and avoid slowing the spread. Omicron, as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky would have you believe, is “basically nature’s vaccine.”
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This narrative, of a ‘docile, harmless’ Omicron, has spread with a virality of its own, gaining popularity and acceptance in drawing room conversations around the world.
So much so that it has moved world authorities to action; several governments, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the scientific community have been forced to reiterate appropriate standards of behaviour over the last few weeks. It has also become important for them to explain why ‘mild’ is a misleading term—at both the individual and societal levels.
But how did this narrative gain momentum in the first place? The Atlantic’s piece has some context.
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At the core of the problem sits the word mild itself, a slippery and pernicious term that “doesn’t mean what people think it means,” Neil Lewis, a behavioral scientist at Cornell, told me. Less severe forms of COVID-19 can certainly be experienced by individual people, especially if they’re vaccinated. And there are true reasons to think that Omicron, particle for particle, might be less toothy than Delta. But Omicron’s unfettered spread has sowed a situation that is not mild at all. And right now, the notion of mildness is making the pandemic worse for everyone.
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It was wishful thinking (heading into the third year of a pandemic that has inflicted death, lockdowns, and isolation on millions) that gave birth to what life science magazine The Scientist calls an ‘oversimplified narrative’.
The problem is, the ‘Omicron is mild’ spin does not take into account the setting—when and where—of the first data reports. What was relevant for South Africa, where omicron was first detected, is not universally valid. Which means this narrative is doing more harm than good.
For instance, The Scientist quotes a 22 December report from the Imperial College London which found that Omicron patients had a 20% to 25% reduced risk of hospitalisation compared to patients infected by the Delta variant, and a 40% to 45% reduced risk of a hospital stay that lasted one or more days.
The research did indicate that the variant has less severe health outcomes. But the reason for that was not just the variant, but when it had appeared and whom it had infected.
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Omicron was first detected in South Africa, a country with a relatively young population of people who are largely either vaccinated, already recovered from COVID-19, or both. That made it hard, experts tell The Scientist, to tell whether Omicron’s severity was really a step back from Delta’s, or if, instead, any new variant emerging this late into the pandemic would seem less severe due to the acquired immunity and clinical knowledge that’s built up over time.
Researchers who spoke to The Scientist tentatively agreed, with varying amounts of confidence, that Omicron is in fact causing relatively fewer cases of severe disease than the Delta variant—a conclusion that’s been supported by several different preprint reports. But varied levels of vaccination, hospital capacity, and other population-level factors across different countries and regions complicate the situation
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The hopeful nature of the story may have hoodwinked the wider audiences into believing it, but there has been mounting conflict among the storytellers.
Last week, BBC reported that the South African scientists who had first detected the Omicron variant believed that Western scepticism about their work could be construed as "racist". Or, at least, a refusal "to believe the science because it came from Africa".
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"The predictions we made at the start of December still hold. Omicron was less severe. Dramatically. The virus is evolving to adapt to the human host, to become like a seasonal virus," said Prof Marta Nunes, senior researcher at the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics department of the University of Witwatersrand…"It didn't take even two weeks before the first evidence started coming out that this is a much milder condition. And when we shared that with the world there was some scepticism," Prof Karim (Prof Salim Karim, former head of the South African government's Covid advisory committee and vice-president of the International Science Council) added.
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That said, the BBC report also mentions the fact that South Africa's average age is 17 years younger than the UK's—which makes things not exactly comparable.
The WHO, meanwhile, has taken a stand that’s directly at odds with the mild Omicron story. “Omicron may be less severe, on average of course, but the narrative that it is a mild disease is misleading, hurts the overall response and costs more lives,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom said at a media briefing on 18 January.
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I remain particularly concerned about many countries that have low vaccination rates, as people are many times more at risk of severe illness and death if they’re unvaccinated…
Make no mistake, Omicron is causing hospitalizations and deaths, and even the less severe cases are inundating health facilities. The virus is circulating far too intensely with many still vulnerable. For many countries, the next few weeks remain really critical for health workers and health systems. I urge everyone to do their best to reduce risk of infection so that you can help take pressure off the system. Now is not the time to give up and wave the white flag.
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In India, too, the government did something rather uncharacteristic.
For the first time ever since the pandemic hit India, INSACOG, the consortium meant to monitor genomic variations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, officially acknowledged that the country has entered the community transmission stage.
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This is the first time a government body has admitted the reality of community transmission on record – in particular contrast to senior government officials’ tendency to be evasive on this topic at official press conferences.
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The implication is that the trajectory of the ongoing third wave of the outbreak is different now from what it was around January 10. There is already speculation that the outbreaks of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata have peaked.
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The bulletin also warned that even though most cases of infection by the omicron variant until then – January 10 – had been asymptomatic or mild, the rate of hospitalisation and ICU admission has been increasing through the ongoing wave.
This is an important observation because the popular belief is that the omicron variant ‘only’ causes mild disease, so it’s okay to let our guard down. But Covid-appropriate behaviour remains as important as ever.
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Govt Body Says Omicron Is in Community Transmission in India, The Wire |
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Today’s storytelling lesson, thus, is this: A narrative becomes popular when people want to hear it.
On that note, have a good weekend and stay safe.
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Narratives are the most powerful tools of our age. Each week, I deconstruct the dominant ones behind the success or failure of businesses, leaders and governments
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