In times of crisis, decision making - which isn’t easy at the best of times – is made even harder.
Decision making during Corona times is ‘Decision making under uncertainty’.
Of course, we always face uncertainty when we ponder where to live (city or countryside, in our native country or abroad), with whom we want to share our lives (partners, children, pets, friends, family) and what we want to do for a living (earn money, save the planet, have fun or a mixture thereof).
For a naturally indecisive person like me this uncertainty might extend to the questions of what to wear (black or white sneakers), what to buy for dinner (salad or pasta) and which book to read next (mind-enhancing masterpiece or guilty pleasure romantic mystery) - questions that can easily keep my mind running amok for hours and prevent me from doing anything useful.
But since the pandemic the uncertainty has grown to unknown levels - and it doesn’t only concern the next years or decades, it concerns the next months, weeks or even days.
Will I still have a job?
Will I be able to travel?
And WHEN (for fuck's sake) can we go back to NORMAL, go back to making our choices on our own terms, instead of the virus’?
When can we go back to hugging our friends, to kissing our grandmother’s cheek, to sharing a drink with someone in a bar, to enjoying the blissful closeness of the crowd in a concert or at a sports event, without the constant risk of triggering an avalanche of new infections and endangering the risk groups?
If we want NORMAL, the virus has to disappear. To make it disappear we need one or more of the following:
· A powerful vaccine, in enough supply to vaccinate large parts of the population
· A treatment, which prevents serious disease courses of COVID19 and/ or longCOVID
· Herd immunity
· A miracle
We watch the headlines like hawks trying to glimpse pieces of information that will tell us when to expect any of those things to materialize.
There are headlines that show the progression of vaccine trials, of miracle cures with a sample size of n=1 or more… There are the shock moments of vaccine and drug trials being put on hold for safety concerns. There are scary headlines that show that immunity seems to be waning fast, of reinfections with severe course.
Reading those headlines in the morning (because yes, I do admit to checking the news on my phone first thing in morning even though I should probably rather meditate or something) jerks around our emotions, can make or break our day.
Do those headlines help our decision making though? Do they tell us how long we have to wait until NORMAL returns?
As an emotional human being, I tend to like the thrill of a good headline. As a scientist, I admit that it might be worth the tedious work of reading some of the associated articles whole - though like many modern humans I seem to have developed a severe attention span issue (by the way, reader, great you’ve hanging in there, we’re almost done here).
Reading beyond the headlines dampens both fear and excitement. It seems likely that one or more of the numerous vaccine candidates will work and even if it doesn’t offer full protection might prevent serious disease courses. The same might be true for some of the approved or currently tested treatment approaches. The loss of immunity might not be as depressing as it appears on first glance, though herd immunity (at least for me!) still seems like a ludicrously dangerous approach, with too many lives at stake.
But none of these approaches currently seems to be the miracle, which will end the pandemic once and for all and none of them has a (believable) near-term time stamp on it, telling us when NORMAL will be back.
What does this mean for our decision making?
Postpone decisions until the Pandemic is over?
I would suggest a different approach.
Embrace the uncertainty.
Make important decisions now.
We might not know how the post-pandemic NORMAL will look like and when it will arrive but then, the future has always seemed more certain than it turned out to be…