The Wuhan Novel Coronavirus - who can you trust?

In her excellent book, Who Can You Trust, Rachel Botsman argues that trust has undergone three evolutions over the last couple of centuries. 

1. Localized trust: Trust in local community
2. Institutionalized trust: Trust that modern institutions will build a safe and prosperous world
3. Distributed trust: Trust in aggregated experiences spread through platform technologies

In the urbanised areas of the developed world, localized trust has pretty much died. How many people living in your building do you actually know? Have you any idea what they do for a living? Do you even know their names? For most of us, it will be close to zero. 

I also bet that as a child you were told never to get into cars or go into the houses of strangers. Yet, how many times have you got into an Uber or stayed at an AirBnB? These services rely on distributed trust. You trust the driver because of his five-star rating. You trust the host because of his five-star rating.  

The Wuhan Coronavirus highlights the tensions between institutionalized trust and distributed trust. 

On more than a few occasions over the last week, I have been told “coronavirus truths” by different people who have taken their information from the social media channels of WeChat, WhatsApp, Weibo and YouTube. In all cases, this was underpinned by an assumption that formal institutions were lying to them and that there were far more cases and deaths than being reported.

Let’s look at how that might occur.

Institutionalized Trust and China

Firstly, China has form in under-reporting new viruses. Its attempt to keep SARS under wraps contributed to wide scale illness and led to 299 deaths in Hong Kong. This continues to fuel distrust between Hong Kong citizens, the mainland government and the Beijing-friendly local administration. As Botsman’s work on the Tuskegee Experiment illustrates that distrust has a half-life of at least 48 years, this is unlikely to dissipate in the near future. 

Indeed, distrust is likely to build thanks to the revelation that Li Wenliang, the doctor who reported a rise in SARS-like symptoms in early December, was accused of “illegal activity” and silenced by the local police two weeks before the 20th anniversary of the annual Wuhan mass banquet of 40,000 families, which was trying to break the world record for the number of dishes served. 

While this silencing was probably significantly accentuated by stupid officials eager to “protect” their world-record attempt, it feeds into the Western discourse of distrust of China, seen in, for example, the Trade War, anti-Huawei sentiment, the worries about the Belt and Road Initiative, and a generally hostile press. 

With all this going on, it is understandable that people don’t trust the official Chinese figures. 

While other formal institutions, such as the WHO, have ratified the figures, institutionalized distrust is impacting them too. Parts of the media have reported that the WHO “was pandering to China’s dictatorship” in its praise of China’s response to the crisis. Other, perhaps more reflective bodies, have accepted the realpolitik necessities of the situation and have argued that the WHO is trying “bloody hard to get it right” and that China deserves “tailored and qualified” praise for its response.

The general public, however, are now getting into a complex tangle with regard to which institutions to believe. 

Do we believe the official figures, reported by China, that were ratified by the WHO and supported by institutions such as Johns Hopkins? If so, we are experiencing institutionalized trust. 

Distributed Trust and Social Media Platforms

Alternatively, do we go onto our social media accounts and find the people not afraid to speak the “real truth”?

One such account I was directed to is Peak Prosperity, which, although ostensibly a YouTube channel about investment, has become a source of information about the coronavirus in recent weeks. It is a well established channel that has been running for over ten years and which has 151k subscribers. Most of the content gets up to 50k views. However, the new coronavirus content is getting 250-400k views. Its most popular coronavirus post has over 4,000 comments. 

If you go down its rabbit hole, it takes you here. This is a blog inviting you to join its online subscriber community in order to get access to its premium content about how to protect yourself from this virus. The blog also links to a book and other paid content. 

Peak Prosperity frames itself as having the “super-power” of being able to sift “through vast piles of snippets and fragments and assembling them into a coherent (if still incomplete) picture. One with actionable insights to help you make important life decisions.”

People who subscribe to its content are “curious, committed life-long learners” who have “commonsense” and “tend to think critically, and trust [their] own judgment” which “sets [them] apart from the masses.” 

People who critique them are “haters” or “trolls” who “shoot the messenger” and support a falsely-comforting mainstream narrative. 

Let’s look at what it has to say. 

Its message is that the Wuhan Novel Coronavirus is far worse than authorities are admitting but you can still protect yourself if you are well-prepared.

The presenter has a PhD in neurotoxicology, so he has undoubted expertise in a usefully related field. He knows how to read academic literature. And he has done his research. Everything he reports has evidential basis. 

Within the academic literature, the worst-case scenario in terms of infections is that only circa 5% of infections have been reported. However, there are uncertainty ranges, which go from 3x-22x actual to reported infections. Worst-case would mean that 80,000 reported cases means 1,600,000+ actual cases. 

While these numbers seem scary, they aren’t as long as the reports of the mortality rates are accurate. In fact, they inverse. If there are “only” 80,000 cases, then the mortality rate sits at a scary 3.4%. If there are 1.6M actual cases and “only” 2,700 deaths, the mortality rate is 0.1% which is roughly the same as influenza. And you don’t run screaming from the flu. 

We then need to take into account the reporting of the victims. 

• 80% are over 60 years old
• 75% have pre-existing illnesses
• 97% are in Hubei (and some other deaths are from people who have been to Wuhan)

Furthermore, respiratory illnesses more heavily impact smokers. 52% of mainland Chinese men smoke, with even higher rates in the over 60s. This might be skewing figures even further.  

Who Can You Trust?

None of this is secret information. All of it is available to the public. I recommend The Lancet, Nature and Imperial College London if you still trust scientific institutions. 

While the numbers seem to be correct, the blog supports them with some attention-grabbing fear and anxiety. It makes an argument about Chinese censorship and about how governments are building huge quarantine camps because they have the true information about how many sick people there are. It accurately reports publicly available information about suspected cases, then spices it up with emotive content. 

The people behind the blog are using a very unlikely worst-case scenario backed up by publicly available numbers to attract “free-thinking” individuals to their content. They use the processes of distributed trust through YouTube to attract subscribers to their community of “critically-thinking” premium subscribers. They even note that very many new members have joined since they started their “truthful” reporting on the coronavirus. 

They are tapping into the viral-spread of fear and anxiety, which is far more potent than hope and rationality, to create a digital community looking for “truth” in a world in which institutional information is distrusted. In an age of distributed trust, the viral spread of its content is clear evidence that it is spreading a Coronavirus gospel. 

It is very clever. Nothing in the blog is wrong, but the interpretation employed is the one with the highest stickiness - the most fear and the most anxiety - which is backed up by appeals to the reader’s intelligence and specialness. That is a powerful combination and the bloggers have been playing the game extremely well. 

This spirals us back to institutional trust. In their analysis, the bloggers use worst-case scenarios for both infections and deaths to support their case. This is very scary. Extrapolated to Spanish Flu levels, it would result in 62 million deaths worldwide.  

However, this interpretation of the mortality rate is almost certainly biased.

This is key. 

It is widely accepted that during epidemics, many infected people will have mild symptoms and so not report them. Or they might be asymptomatic and not even know they are carriers. The important question is how many of these people are there? And this explains the 3x to 22x range of estimations. 

It is, of course, less likely that people will fail to notice or report a dead body. While not every cause of death will be accurately reported, once an epidemic becomes common knowledge, they generally will be. 

While it might be possible that people are dying en masse in China and the numbers are being deliberately misreported, this misreporting would need to be replicated in other countries with more open societies and a free press. This isn’t happening. 

Outside of Wuhan, which experienced dramatic exposure to the virus before any medical response, there is nothing to suggest the coronavirus is any worse than the flu. Yet, on the blog it conspicuously and consistently says “this isn’t like flu.”

I have suspicions that they know they are choosing anxiety-provoking interpretations and relying on fear and anxiety to propagate - not unlike a virus, eh?

This is the challenge of distributed trust. While you might be able to trust aggregated scores of Uber drivers, AirBnB hosts, or even Glassdoor reviews of employee experience, when the issue is emotive, that trust doesn’t necessarily hold. This is especially the case when your ego is being stroked. When a blogger tells you that you are one of the few people with the critical faculties to “get” this. This locks you into a distributed “trust community” which, unfortunately, has all the hallmarks of an echo-chamber. 

Disclaimer

I might be wrong and the mortality rates might be being deliberately covered up worldwide. But I am always far more prepared to believe in human weakness (the stickiness of fear, anxiety and the appeal to ego) than human ingenuity (the ability to cover up what’s really going on in the face of wide-scale attention) when it comes to this kind of reporting. Either way, by using a hot topic to sensemake, I hope this has been an interesting exploration of the evolution of trust. 

There’s also a very real worry that few countries other than China are equipped to respond as effectively as China did if (or when) the virus establishes itself there. This is a theme that the WHO is beginning to suggest is more than possible. Then the mistrust of China might take on a tragically ironic hue.