Fading the Dire

So glad we've almost made it
So sad they had to fade it
--Tears for Fears

I'm a contrarian by nature. As such, I like to fade 'conventional wisdom.' As Clay Travis observes, the 'conventional wisdom' w.r.t. COVID-19 is that public health outcomes will be extremely dire. The virus will be with us for a long time and result in millions of deaths, so goes the narrative.

It’s truly astounding how many coronavirus bros there are on social media who are rooting for the virus to triumph and refuse to accept any positive numbers at all. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s wild.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) March 28, 2020

The depth of the negativity is, as Travis notes, astounding. Many people, lots of them politically grounded and nearly all of them extremely emotional, are so committed to pessimism that they are having trouble seeing that their worst case scenarios could easily by altered by dynamic, adaptive responses already in motion.

Although uncertainty here makes outcomes difficult to forecast with confidence, the dire, worst case scenario space seems very crowded...and very fadeable.