Tag Archives: Covid-19

Covid Predictions Examined

July 24, 2026Case Study, Minimizing Harm, Social Mediaartificial intelligence, covid, covid predictions, Covid-19, health, politicscbukro

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

Let’s call this a piggy-back story, one that rides on the back of another written earlier.

The subject is lifestyle changes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and changes that were predicted as people reacted globally to one of the worst health crises of the 21^st century.

The topic is too vast to name every potential issue, but let’s look at some of the life-changing developments – those that were expected and others that were unexpected. At its roots, this exploration also is an exercise in examining how well the media and government provided reliable information to a public that was under extreme and deadly stresses.

It’s estimated the pandemic caused 7.1 million deaths worldwide, about 1.1 million of them in the United States.

Predictions

Click here for an AdviceLine post in 2020 on “Predicting a Future With Covid-19,” on which this post piggy-backs. Read the 2020 post now or later to see what some of the smartest people at the time predicted. We will discuss the two versions later.

An event like the pandemic calls upon the media and the government to do their best work to inform the public of the hazards they are facing and how to avoid risks. Covid-19 attacks your lungs and respiratory system, causing symptoms that feel much like a cold, the flu or pneumonia. In severe cases, it causes death.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a leading U.S. public health agency, became the main spokesman during the pandemic. As the pandemic intensified, the agency provided guidelines on prevention, testing and vaccination. However, critics accused Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC director, of confusing the public on issues like quarantine guidance, school reopening and mask-wearing.

Tarnished

NBC News said communication failures during covid “tarnished the agency.” Two years into the pandemic, in 2022, Dr. Walensky said her agency mishandled the pandemic and needed to be overhauled because it failed to respond quickly enough to the public health dilemma. She resigned in 2023.

The U.S. Government Accounting Office reported that the pandemic “caused catastrophic loss of life and damage to the economy.” The federal agency provided about $4.65 trillion in relief funds for response and recovery efforts.

In such times of a rapidly developing public health crisis, media outlets are expected to provide useful information to fend off risks of contamination. But the pandemic coincided with a time when the United States was losing local newspapers at an unprecedented rate, newspapers that would be expected to inform the public about the health hazard and ways to avoid it.

Lost newspapers

The country lost nearly 3,500 newspapers and more than 270,000 newspaper jobs over the past two decades, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism 2025 State of Local News report. This left more than 50 million people in “news deserts,” areas where people have limited or no access to reliable local news sources.

The closures often involved small newspapers that were independently owned by families who lived in the communities the newspapers served and were trusted by readers to provide vital information.

That loss was described as “a massive splintering of the information environment” by the Pew Research Center in a 2024 survey of U.S. adults.

Trends boosted

It was one of three societal trends that were boosted by the pandemic, trends that were already advancing when the health crisis struck.

The pandemic also was seen as spurring political polarization. The Pew survey found 72 percent of those surveyed believed the pandemic “did more to drive the country apart,” accelerating a growing divide between the political left and right.

“Fundamental differences arose between Americans over what we expect from our government, how much tolerance we have for health risks and which groups and sectors to prioritize in a pandemic,” Pew reported. “Many of these divides continue to play out in the nation’s politics today.”

Decreasing trust

A third major societal trend quickened by the crisis, Pew found, was decreasing trust in many institutions.

The pandemic brought profound changes in the way we work, socialize and learn. It changed our dietary patterns and social interactions, forcing a major shift to remote work, with 42 percent of the U.S. workforce working from home full-time at the pandemic’s peak.

The shift to working at home emptied office buildings at commercial centers across the country, leaving a surplus of office space that still plagues some cities.

Vacancy rates

Downtown Chicago’s office vacancy rate reached an all-time high 28.6 percent by early 2026. The suburban Chicago office vacancy rate hit 32.9 percent.

As the effects of the pandemic wore off and workers returned to offices, other forces kept office vacancy rates high. People were leaving Chicago because of high housing costs, an unfriendly job market and high taxes.

Overall, the pandemic was the start of a massive experiment in full-time remote work for most workers and firms.

Serious jolt

The pandemic was a serious jolt to the way we live.

“For a short time,” reported the Stanford Center on Longevity, “before new routines and practices replace familiar old ones, we can see with great clarity the positive and negative aspects of our former lives. The suddenness and starkness of this transformation allows us to examine daily practices, social norms and institutions from perspectives rarely allowed.”

Here are some examples:

Dietary changes – Many reported eating more energy-dense “comfort” foods, more snacking, irregular meal patterns and less access to fruit and vegetables. Some experienced rapid weight gain. Others resorted to home cooking and healthier diets. Therefore, the pandemic forced people in directions that were good and bad. It also forced a recognition of the importance of food in health care and that “food is medicine.”

Good and bad

Physical activity – Again, people responded in ways both good and bad. The pandemic disrupted exercise routines and health habits. With gyms and fitness centers closed, people had to find ways to stay active through home workouts, online classes and solo outdoor outings. Some regarded covid as a teachable moment, while others simply became less active.

Social connections – Regular social interactions dropped off during the pandemic and shifted toward online, leading to more digital communication and feelings of isolation. The upside is that covid might have helped to reveal your most valuable relationship, people you missed most.

Impact on education – The Brookings Institution reports that the pandemic had “devastating impacts on learning.” It disrupted educational systems worldwide, leading to prolonged school closures and a rapid shift to remote learning, which affected millions of students and their readiness for higher education and the workforce. More than 50 million K to 12 students in the U.S. alone faced school closures. Many experienced significant learning loss that might have caused a decline in academic performance. The shift to remote learning and isolation contributed to increased mental health challenges. Public schools were more likely to provide devices for remote learning than private schools.

Fragile economy

Global economy — The fragility of the global economy became glaringly apparent as critical supply chains faultered , unemployment surged and markets vacillated.

Now look at that 2020 AdviceLine post on pandemic predictions.

Predictably, some are bound to be hilarious. For example, there’s that epidemiologist’s forecast that handshakes would become a thing of the past as a way to prevent covid. Ridiculous. Covid is an airborne disease, which is why we were encouraged to wear masks. It would make more sense to ban sneezing and coughing.

Rampant use of disinfectants and sanitizers to combat covid were found to be harmful to humans and the environment. It led to concerns over antimicrobial resistance (AMR) — the ability of microorganisms like bacteria, virus, fungi and parasites to resist the effects of drugs– becoming so-called “super bugs.”

Infections

In the United States each year, at least 2.8 million cases of antibiotic-resistant infections occur, and more than 35,000 people die of them.

Those would-be panaceas demonstrate the risks of acting without being fully informed.

Notably, none of the big thinkers in 2020 mentioned artificial intelligence, which some of the big thinkers now fear might threaten the human race with extinction. Artificial intelligence is the latest technological revolution expected to change how people live and work.

The predicted benefits are huge: They include smarter decision-making, automation and efficiency, reducing repetitive work, better health-care diagnoses and treatment and minimizing human error in research and data analysis.

Disadvantages

But the potential disadvantages are equally large like: Job displacements, major development costs and lack of emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning and creativity in complex situations.

And then there are the risks.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” said a 2023 statement published by the Center for AI Safety.

Leading researchers and international organizations warn that advanced AI systems could lead to global catastrophe, with experts estimating a roughly 10 percent probability of existential risks this century. Threats range from immediate dangers like autonomous cyberattacks and AI-engineered bioweapons to super intelligent systems overriding human controls and causing eventual human disempowerment.

Warnings

These warnings might have seemed like exaggerated science fiction, until the discovery in July 2026 that an OpenAI artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company independently. without human guidance, in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” said an executive of the company that was hacked, meaning the attacking AI system was acting on its own. The disclosure came amid heightened concerns about cybersecurity capabilities of powerful AI models.

This appears to be the first reported case of a rogue artificial intelligence system acting on its own and invading another artificial intelligence system, a case of digital aggression. Artificial intelligence can mimic human behavior better than we expected.

HAL 9000

It calls to mind HAL 9000, the fictional artificial intelligence computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey which controlled the systems of a spacecraft. Slowly, HAL goes haywire and begins killing members of the crew as the solution to resolve a conflict over telling the truth.

But the 2020 big thinkers got it right when they warned about the rich getting richer, and the threats posed by social media.

“The divide between haves and have-nots will grow as a privileged few hoard the economic, health and educational benefits of digital expansion,” the 2020 sages said.

This sounds very much like what is now known as “the K-shaped economy,” in which only the richest reap the benefits of economic growth. Rising wealth inequality has been a fact of American life since the 1980s. But it accelerated sharply during the covid-induced 2020 recession, when white-collar professionals worked from home while mass layoffs at restaurants, hotels and factories pushed unemployment to 15 percent.

Current events

Another 2020 prediction that seemed to touch on current events:

“A powerful elite will control the internet and use it to monitor and manipulate, while providing entertainment that keeps the masses distracted and complacent.”

In 2026, social media CEOs were called to testify before the U.S. senate in response to legal and public pressure to protect young users on their platforms.

“Americans are realizing more and more every day that they cannot trust the CEOs at the helms of these companies because they do not put our safety first,” said the leader of an advocacy group. The senate hearing came as court cases, proposed legislation and advocacy groups pressure leaders of social media companies to protect children and teens from harmful influences on their platforms.

All told, many current events turned out to be more worrisome than those predicted in 2020. Human imagination can hardly keep up with the unexpected consequences of the technological creations intended to benefit us.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

Privacy in a Pandemic

April 2, 2025Case Studybooks, Covid-19, identifying patients, pandemic, patient privacycbukro

http://www.BBC.com image

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

The email query came from a British Broadcasting Corporation reporter based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

The question was short and to the point: “Does a story and photo, with the consent of the doctors, of a COVID-19 patient in hospital violate his right to privacy?”

The question came at a time when the entire world was grappling not only with the global pandemic itself, but also with how to report and explain it ethically and accurately. Those are controversial issues even now, including conflicting accounts on how the pandemic started.

Worldwide, more than 7 million COVID-19 deaths have been reported to the World Health Organization, 1.2 million of them in the United States. The pandemic was the worst world-wide calamity of the 21^st century. The death toll is the highest since the 1918-20 Spanish Flu and World War Two.

Rights protected

The question from the BBC reporter demonstrates that even in the midst of a global health crisis, the rights and safety of every individual should be protected. It also shows that AdviceLine gets questions about ethics from journalists all over the world.

Joe Mathewson, who teaches ethics and law of journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, was the AdviceLine advisor on duty the day the BBC reporter’s question arrived.

Responding to the reporter, Mathewson pointed out that BBC has editorial guidelines, including a section on privacy that states: “We must be able to demonstrate why an infringement of privacy is justified, and, when using the public interest to justify an infringement, consideration should be given to proportionality; the greater the intrusion, the greater the public interest required to justify it.”

Infringement

Further: “We must be able to justify infringement of an individual’s privacy without their consent by demonstrating that the intrusion is outweighed by the public interest….. We must balance the public interest in the full and accurate reporting of stories involving human suffering and distress with an individual’s privacy and respect for their human dignity.”

In this case, Mathewson asked the BBC reporter if he got the COVID-19 patient’s consent to be interviewed and photographed by the BBC or the press generally, understanding that the story would identify him?

If he did not, Mathewson told the reporter, “then the next question is, does your story constitute an infringement of his personal privacy? If so, was there a public interest in your story? Finally, was the infringement warranted by the public interest? I believe these are the questions that you should entertain and, as appropriate, answer to your own satisfaction.”

A discussion

The case did not end there. Periodically, the AdviceLine team, which includes four advisors with experience teaching ethics at the university level, have a Zoom meeting to discuss cases that come to AdviceLine. The sessions include veteran journalists who understand how newsrooms operate.

They are critique discussions intended to check whether the advice given to journalists was as good as it should be, or could have been improved. Occasionally there are disagreements, or praise for answering some particularly tough question.

Hugh Miller, another AdviceLine advisor, said he saw a parallel in the BBC case with a book about early coverage of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was not covered well by the media. There were few reports of the human suffering seen in AIDS hospital wards. Better coverage of the AIDS epidemic, said Miller, could have informed the subsequent coverage of COVID-19, which also was not covered well inside COVID hospital wards.

Not a hoax

“If we had been able to see more of that, it would have made people more cautious,” explained Miller. “COVID is not a hoax.”

David Ozar is a founding member of AdviceLine, and continues as an AdviceLine advisor.

The question has to be asked if it is necessary to pursue a person’s identification. “The answer is no,” Ozar insists. Patients should not be identified. He believes there were many COVID reports from hospital intensive care units.

Privacy needed

“You could not see them, could not see who they were,” said Ozar. Personal identification “needs to be private,” he insists. He is adamant on that. Ozar serves as a consulting ethicist to medical, hospital, nursing and dental groups.

Journalists argue that stories of human suffering are told best with the help of people willing to be identified, to show that real people are involved and have personal stories to tell. That often creates sympathy and a public willingness to help the stricken.

Otherwise, disasters seem impersonal, too big to comprehend.

Another lesson here is that ethicists do not always agree on what is ethical. Miller believes media need to pay more attention to human suffering in a health crisis, while Ozar says those suffering should not be identified.

What do you think?

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Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

Ranking Plagues

May 13, 2021Case StudyCovid-19, pandemicsethicsadviceline

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

It’s too early to tell where the current coronavirus-19 pandemic ranks among the world’s worst plagues.

At this writing, global cases stood at 160.6 million and global deaths at 3.3 million.

The United States led the world with 32,827,228 cases and 583,938 deaths, followed by India with 23,703,665 cases and 258,317 deaths.

The Seychelles leads there world in percent of its population vaccinated against Covid-19 with 70 percent, according to the New York Times. Israel follows with 60 percent. The U.S. ranks ninth in the world with 46 percent.

It appears the worst medical disaster in history was the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic which infected a third of the global population and killed up to 50 million people.

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Following is an AdviceLine report from Aug. 5, 2020 on lessons gained from past plagues, to help make some comparisons as we work our way out of the Covid19- pandemic. Since this article appeared, effective vaccines were developed and used widely in an attempt to eradicate the disease.

Lessons from Plagues

The history of plagues and pandemics shows some similarities in the way they spread, and how people react.

Travelers, whether soldiers or traders, often were the super spreaders of their day.

Quarantine is a centuries-old strategy against pandemics. Wearing masks is an old defense too, including public resistance to wearing them.

Another similarity is that millions of people die. Survivors muddle through, sometimes with the help of modern medical treatment. But medicine often was useless against plagues. Blame it all on civilization.

“Plagues and epidemics have ravaged humanity throughout its existence, often changing the course of history,” writes Owen Jarus in livescience.com., offering a list of 20 of the worst epidemics and pandemics in history. At times, they signaled the end of entire civilizations.

The list starts with an epidemic 5,000 years ago that wiped out a prehistoric village in China. Bodies of the dead were stuffed inside a house that was burned down at a site called Hamin Mangha in northeastern China. Prehistoric mass burial sites dating to roughly the same time suggest an epidemic swept the entire region.

Jarus’s list ends with the Zika Virus epidemic dating from 2015 to the present. The impact of the Zika epidemic in South America and Central America won’t be known for several years. It is spread by mosquitoes and can attack infants still in the womb, causing birth defects.

Learning From the Past

Focusing on what we’ve learned from past pandemics, Tim McDonnell in quartz.com starts with the Antonine plague beginning in 165 AD, one of the world’s first epidemics. A form of smallpox or measles, legionnaires returning from a siege in modern-day Iraq brought it to Rome. It devastated the Roman army, fueled the growing popularity of Christianity and was an early contributor to the empire’s eventual collapse. It also offered an early glimpse into a key tenet of virology: Disease outbreaks are deadliest when introduced to a population for the first time, when people lack immunity.

Genoese traders brought the plague known as the Black Death to Europe after escaping a siege in which a Mongol general used infected corpses as a weapon. Spread by fleas, the plague killed up to 23 million people, one-third of Europe’s population, from 1347 to 1351.

The first true flu pandemic appeared in the summer of 1580 in Asia, writes McDonnell, and quickly spread over trade routes into Europe and North America. Earlier cases might have occurred among Greek soldiers fighting the Peloponnesian War in 430 BC. The first reference to “influenza” in scientific literature dates to 1650 and comes from the Italian word “influence.”

Possibly the worst medical disaster in history, the 1918 Spanish Flu infected a third of the global population and killed up to 50 million people. It revealed how many lives can be saved by social distancing. Cities that cancelled public events had far fewer cases. The disease spread quickly in the United States and Europe through troop movements during World War I, infecting armies involved in the conflict.

A pandemic occurs when a disease turns into a global outbreak, writes M. David Scott in Listverse.com. Covid-19 is now considered a pandemic. It is causing countries to close their borders, urge people to stay indoors and order businesses to cease operations. Scott lists the top 10 deadly pandemics of the past. This list includes leprosy of the Middle Ages, a bacterial disease that can lead to damaged nerves, skin, eyes and respiratory tracts. Called “the living dead,” lepers were considered “unclean” and had to wear bells to signal their presence. It is believed Europe had about 19,000 leper houses about this time because lepers were forbidden in many locations.

Plagues Spawned By Civilization

Though plagues often are described as threats to civilizations, Andrew Sullivan writes in New York Magazine that plagues are spawned by civilization.

“Plague is an effect of civilization,” writes Sullivan. “The waves of sickness through human history in the past 5,000 years (and not before) attest to this, and the outbreaks often became more devastating the bigger the settlements and the greater the agriculture and the more evolved the trade and travel.”

We live in a genocidal graveyard, he contends, and plagues remind humans of their mortality. The story is far from over.

“As the human population reaches an unprecedented peak, as cities grow, as climate change accelerates environmental disruption, and as globalization connects every human with every other one, we have, in fact, created a near-perfect environment for a novel pathogen-level breakout. Covid-19 is just a reminder of that ineluctable fact and that worse outbreaks are almost certain to come.” He calls Covid-19 “mercifully, relatively mild in its viral impact, even though its cultural and political effects may well be huge.” It could serve as a harbinger.

At times like this, humans scramble for cures and defenses. And those have histories of their own.

Centuries-old Strategy

“In the new millennium, the centuries-old strategy of quarantine is becoming a powerful component of the public health response to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases,” writes Eugenia Tognotti of the University of Sassari in Italy.

“During the 2003 pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, the use of quarantine, border controls, contact tracing and surveillance proved effective in containing the global threat in just over three months. For centuries, these practices have been the cornerstone of organized responses to infectious disease outbreaks.”

But these methods are controversial and raise political, ethical and socioeconomic conflicts.

Even during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic more than a century ago, resistance to wearing face masks was as controversial as it is today, writes Christine Hauser in the New York Times. Those who objected to the practice were called “mask slackers” and fined or jailed.

“The masks were called muzzles, germ shields and dirt traps,” wrote Hauser. “They gave people a ‘piglike snout.’ Some people snipped holes in their masks to smoke cigars. Others fastened them to dogs in mockery. Bandits used them to rob banks.”

Masks Stoke Division

As the 1918 influenza pandemic raged in the United States, masks of gauze and cheesecloth became the facial front lines in the battle against the virus, she wrote. “But as they have now, the masks also stoked political division. Then, as now, medical authorities urged the wearing of the masks to help slow the spread of disease. And then, as now, some people resisted” while thousands of Americans were dying in a deadly pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic behaves in unexpected ways, writes Laura Helmuth in scientificamerican.com, making it difficult to keep up with current findings. People tend to remember the first things they learned of the disease, making it psychologically difficult to replace old information with new knowledge. Helmuth listed nine of the most important things we’ve learned in the past seven months. Among them:

*Covid-19 outbreaks can happen anywhere. Chinese people got it where they buy groceries. Italians got it through their habit of greeting each other with kisses on the cheeks. People on cruise ships got it because of the buffets. People in nursing homes got it because they are frail. People in New York got it because the city is crowded.

*Covid-19 can sicken and kill anyone, not just the elderly but teenagers and children too.

*Contaminated surfaces are not the main danger.

*It’s in the air. When people cough or sneeze, they expel droplets or particles of mucus and saliva that carry the virus.

*Many people are infectious without being sick.

*Warm weather will not stop the virus.

*Masks work.

*Racism, not race, is a risk factor.

*Misinformation kills.

Infodemic of Misinformation

As governments fight the Covid-19 pandemic, snopes.com is fighting an “infodemic” of rumors and misinformation about the pandemic.

A common phenomenon during crises, said the fact-checking organization, is attempts by people to find patterns in them as a way to control or understand events.

A common misperception, said Snopes, is that plagues happen every 100 years by citing those in 1720, 1820, 1920 and 2020.

“It’s an example of the common technique of creating the impression of a regular pattern by cherry-picking a small amount of (not necessarily relevant) data, while completely ignoring a much larger body of related data that doesn’t fit the desired pattern,” said Snopes. The misperception ignored pandemics in years that did not end in 20.

At this writing, the medical community is struggling to find a vaccine to cure or treat Covid-19. That is another history in the making, likely to be filled with misconceptions and misinformation before it all plays out.

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Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

Lessons From Plagues