Dr. Amy

The Ohio Department of Health Director, Dr. Acton has stood by DeWine and guided the state through its fight against the coronavirus (COVID-19) over the course of the past month. In that time, Acton has been lauded for her calming and optimistic approach during an inarguably trying time.

Who is Dr. Amy and what has been her positive message during these challenging times?

Look for the Helpers

1) According to Mr. Rogers, what is a 'HELPER?'  Who played Mr. Rogers in the movie and why is that ironic given current headlines? Who was the real Mr. Rogers?

2) Do you have to wear a helmet or a uniform to be a helper?  Are you a helper? How?

3) What would you do if a man or a woman walked up to the door, opened their coat, and had a bomb strapped to them?  Would you run?  Would you hide?  Or would you charge them?

4) Is someone who ignores the 'social distancing' guidelines and wantonly puts others at danger of infection any different than a terrorist with a bomb?  Why or why not?

CV19 Daffodils

In Governor DeWine’s daily news briefings, streamed live so ordinary residents can pop in, he strikes a somber but not panicked tone, calmly reciting the latest statistics and frequently deferring to his health director, Dr. Amy Acton, to answer specific questions. But with each passing day, DeWine has made a point to emphasize the gravity of what the nation is facing, and what we can do to defeat it.

Watch the latest briefing here.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear...

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took the stage and delivered his first inaugural address, he beheld legions of frightened Americans. The year was 1933. A quarter of the nation was unemployed.

As he bellowed those now-famous words—the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—Roosevelt couldn’t have fathomed the face of his country a mere 85+ years later. For there’s no doubt that “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance” seizes the citizenry more tightly today than ever before.

One explanation for the incapacitating nature of contemporary fear is that our brains simply are not wired to process modern life. In his 2008 book The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger, journalist Daniel Gardner unfolds the ways we fail to assess risk properly, as well as the sobering consequences.

Our subconscious mind issues lightning-fast judgments about danger based on principles that evolved during our cave-dwelling days. Psychologists refer to this as the 'fight or flight' mechanism: the gut instinct served us well when it steered us clear of places where humans often met with hungry predators. Today, though, the nightly news stocks our subconscious with frightening images of plane crashes, superbugs, and child abductions; faced with related decisions, our guts make the decidedly wrong calls.

Take for example the 12 months after 9/11, during which, researchers now know, an understandably large number of people heeded their guts and avoided flying. Fear itself put millions of additional people in cars. Flying, however, is vastly safer than driving, and in that one year, traffic fatalities on U.S. roads spiked. An additional 1,595 people lost their lives. At the end of the year, air travel numbers returned to normal, and traffic fatalities resumed their disconcerting but regular rates.

Our brains are poorly equipped to weigh risks that don’t result in immediate negative consequences, Psych­ology Today observed last February. One more cigarette, one more fast-food meal: What’s the harm? Marketers, politicians, and entertainers grasp with precision how brains misfire, and they apply this knowledge to great gain. Fearmongering has worked wonders for everyone from real estate agents hawking gated communities to advocacy groups attempting to recruit members.

A "fnord" is pop-culture term used to describe something in the news media that subconsciously generates a feeling of uneasiness and confusion, preventing rationality, and creating fear. The term originally comes from 'conspiracy theorists' who claim we are surrounded by 'fnords' every day and that the governments of the world are using them to control us. Can you see the 'fnords?!'

Dangerous Numbers

STATISTICS NEVER LIE BUT LIARS ALWAYS USE STATISTICS

Numbers have a certain mystique: They seem precise, exact, sometimes even beyond doubt. But outside the field of pure mathematics, this reputation rarely is deserved. And when it comes to the coronavirus epidemic, buying into that can be downright dangerous.

Naturally, everyone wants to know how deadly COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is. The technical term for that is the case fatality rate — which is, put simply, the number of people who have died from the disease (D) divided by the total number of people who were infected with it (I), or D/I. As of Tuesday morning, at least 1,873 people were thought to have died from the disease worldwide and 72,869 people to have been infected.

But those figures may not mean what you think.