New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on March 27, “I operate on facts….Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, but I don’t operate here (in the midst of a pandemic) on opinion. I operate on facts and on data and on numbers and on projections.” A “Fact” is defined as “something that is known to have happened or exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information.” Mr. Cuomo’s facts (at that time) were based on projections from Weill Cornell Medicine, the CDC and McKinsey (a global management consulting company) which suggested that thousands more ventilators would be needed in New York to combat the ever-growing number of Covid-19 patients.
Mr. Trump, said Cuomo, was operating on “opinion” when he spoke to Sean Hannity of Fox News and said that he didn’t really think all those ventilators were needed in New York. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 o 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go into major hospitals, sometimes they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’” And as it turns out, thankfully, New York did not need all those ventilators. Opinion vs. Fact. Would New York have needed those ventilators if social distancing and other drastic measures had not been put in place to change the course of the information and data Cuomo had at his disposal at the time of his request?
Will we “operate on “facts” or “opinion?” Will we follow the dictates of science and rationality? (Rationality is defined as acting “in accordance with reason or logic”). Or will we succumb to opinion, which is defined as “a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge?”
Deborah Jane Orr wrote in the Guardian back in 2017: “Humans like to think we are rational. Some of us are more rational than others. But, essentially we are all slaves to our feelings and emotions.” We think it is our right to make half-formed judgements, based on little more than how we feel or based on our political or religious biases. Can people be relied upon to make rational choices is a big question right now. So many opinions are out there, in print and online, that have caused us to think that experts are overrated, data is unreliable, science is suspect, and anything that we don’t particularly like is “fake news.” We are all part of the problem.
We are living in the midst of a global pandemic. Current data indicates 2 million confirmed cases today and 138,000 deaths worldwide (this is not a projection—this is a fact). I don’t like the data, but that doesn’t mean it is fake news. I don’t like the social distancing that has been imposed, but data shows that it has had an effect on the spread. I am trying to operate, with Cuomo, on facts based on reliable data provided by experts and health professionals. How about you?
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