Messaging delivery disruption
NOV. 22, 20203 AM
To the editor: Los Angeles County health officials are baffled by what’s causing the ongoing COVID-19 surge. They should drive around and observe people, then go for a walk in the evening and ask passersby to put on a mask, and see how aggresive people become.
Go shopping at a grocery store or pick up food at any restaurant, and don’t indentify yourself as a county official. Observe people’s behaviors. It’s really that simple.
People with poor masking habits are a big problem. They are hostile when asked to wear their mask correctly.
There needs to be a better effort at public education. Where are the daily alerts to our phones telling us to mask up? I see Amazon trucks everywhere; why don’t they put up “wear your mask” signs? With the messaging efforts of today, the Allies might not have won World War II.
Officials are treating this like “disaster lite.” The police officers I’ve seen seem not to care about masking up; many of them don’t even wear their own masks correctly.
This country practically invented marketing. It is confounding to me that the campaign out of California of all places has been so weak. You couldn’t sell meat to a dog with this approach.
We need to do a much better job convincing people that the pandemic is the life-threatening emergency that it is.
Catherine Lincoln, La Crescenta
The paper also ran a full page ad sponsored by every hospital and medical center in California, it seemed. But few probably noticed it.
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Further Reading:
From News Fatigue to News Avoidance: neimanlab.org
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
