For decades, Americans have been entertained by movies, games, books, and more depicting global pandemics. The typical appeal of this pandemic genre is that it is always ridiculously unrealistic for the sake of entertainment. However, as the United States continues to face the COVID-19 pandemic, it is becoming more and more clear that the pandemic genre is not as unrealistic as first thought.
One major example of this is a video game called Plague Inc. In this game, you play as a disease with the goal of destroying the world. The main things that set the accuracy of the game are its settings.
The easiest setting is Casual, where people don't wash their hands, doctors don't work, and sick people are effectively exposed to as many people as possible. The next setting up is Normal, where a little over two-thirds of the global population washes their hands, doctors work a few days of the week, and sick people are generally ignored. The third difficulty is Brutal, where the global population are compulsive hand washers, doctors never leave the office, and sick people are imprisoned.
Now, none of these options are 100% accurate to either America's COVID response, or the perception of how America would respond, but before COVID hit, most American's would probably expect a pandemic response to accurately be somewhere between Normal and Brutal. In reality, America's COVID response has fallen somewhere between Casual and Normal.
Though it is true that a little over half of Americans follow proper COVID protection protocol, it is not accurate to say that two-thirds of the population does. It is also not accurate to say that that number of people even washes their hands.
It would also not be accurate to say that sick people are treated in any way the game says they would be. In reality, sick people are either hospitalized or encouraged to isolate themselves if they don't have a life-threatening case of COVID-19. However, there is no real enforcement of that isolation, so a sick person could easily break isolation and expose others wherever they go.
In terms of doctors and research, however, America's response has been closer to the Brutal difficulty. Doctors still get to go home, but they work daily to treat COVID patients, so much so that many become overwhelmed. Research doctors also work daily in the race to develop a vaccine for Covid-19.
Though we don't live in a video game, there are certainly plenty of similarities between even the most ridiculous piece of pandemic entertainment and America's own response to COVID. For the longest time, this genre was something that nobody thought could happen in real life, but now it really is happening. For us to survive this pandemic, we must avoid making the same mistakes we make in the movies, games, and books we love.
