Don't Panic About Ebola—And Don't Panic About People Panicking Either

When the
news broke yesterday that a man in Dallas had been diagnosed with
Ebola, my colleague Ron Bailey delivered the news with some
sensible advice: “Don’t
Panic!” He had plenty of company. Politico published a

story headlined “Ebola’s here: Don’t panic.” The Los
Angeles Times explained
“why you don’t need to panic,” and Business Insider

told us “Why You Shouldn’t Panic.” Salon,
uncharacteristically cautious,
said “there’s (probably) no reason to panic.” And in Ebola’s
new home, The Dallas Morning News ran an
item headlined “Why a positive Ebola test in Dallas is no cause
for panic.” I
could go on, but you get the picture: The press is filled with
people who don’t want you to panic.

For the record, I don’t want you to panic either. Even if I
thought Ebola was going to spark a public health crisis in America,
I wouldn’t tell you to panic. Panic is always a bad idea, pretty
much by definition. You shouldn’t do it.

But while it’s fine for the media to tell us not to panic about
Ebola, let’s bear in mind that the people most likely to panic
about Ebola are the media. Everyday citizens tend to keep their
heads in situations like this. As I
wrote half a decade ago, when the purported panic on the
horizon involved swine flu, “It’s easy to find examples of public
anxiety, with every hypochondriac in the country fretting
that the cold his kid always catches this time of year was actually
the killer flu. But panic? Where’s the evidence of that?” Going
through a series of stories that were supposed to show flu
hysteria, I was underwhelmed. A Time
feature, for example, had a headline that said a “swine flu
panic” had hit Mexico, but the actual article didn’t demonstrate
that:

It tells us that many Mexicans donned facemasks, as
recommended by their government; that stores quickly sold out of
masks and vitamin supplements; that schools in Mexico City shut
down; that some people left the city and others stayed put. In
other words, it tells us that ordinary Mexicans were taking
ordinary precautions. The Bild report merely informs us
that a few schools in New York had closed and that many children
displaying flu-like symptoms were sent home. The Guardian
timeline includes a series of links to Mexican photographs that
allegedly “capture the sense of panic everywhere.” Click through,
and you’ll see pictures of people calmly going about their business
while wearing masks. My favorite photo features a woman on a subway
reading a newspaper, a vaguely bored look in her eyes. If this is
panic, we need a new word for chaotic stampedes.

Even the CNN story, which at
least involves exaggerated worries and a potentially destructive
diversion of resources, stops well short of describing a public
panic. We learn that the number of patients at the emergency
department at Chicago Children’s Memorial Hospital more than
doubled after the flu hit the news; we learn that some hospitals in
California set up triage tents to separate the sick from the merely
anxious. We learn nothing about people storming ERs, fighting each
other for dwindling medical supplies, or acting in anything other
than an orderly way.

“People are sharing information, they’re seeking out information,
they’re asking questions about whether or not they have the
symptoms,” says Jeannette Sutton, a researcher at the Natural
Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Those are
not incidents of panic or hysteria. That’s rational thinking, where
people are asking questions and trying to make decisions based on
the information they have available to them.”

When I distinguish anxiety from panic, I’m not
just splitting hairs. The fear of panic—actual panic—has shaped
public policy in unfortunate ways. During a disaster, it’s not
uncommon for officials to hold useful information close to their
vests because they don’t want to “spread panic,” even though nine
decades of research have established that the public almost always
remains calm in such a crisis….Now imagine if those officials
instead argued that they should hold back important information
because they don’t want to “spread anxiety.” Their position would
sound absurd. Nothing fans anxieties like a dearth of solid
information, and nothing resolves anxiety like concrete
data.

Yes, “panic” is a flexible word. I myself use
it rather
broadly when the subject
is a so-called moral
panic, trusting readers to understand that the phrase is a
metaphor. But let’s be clear about what social threats (as
opposed to medical threats) should worry us. In Dallas right now,
the chances that people will start stampeding in the streets is
far, far smaller than the chances that scare-mongering coverage
will make it harder to get good information.

In that spirit, I appreciate all those don’t-panic pieces. I
just hope they’re being read in the rest of the newsroom.