Opinion | We Need Tornado Warnings for Disease Outbreaks
In 1925, a tornado cut a track hundreds of miles long, flattening schools and houses across three Midwestern states.At points, the storm was nearly a mile wide and appeared to observers not as a thin funnel but as a wall of angry clouds.
Nearly 700 people lost their lives, making it the deadliest tornado in U.S.history.The tragedy was compounded by an astounding error of human judgment.
At the time, it was taboo for weather scientists to forecast tornadoes in public communication.Experts feared that such a warning would cause unnecessary disruption or panic if the tornado didn’t materialize.
Residents in the path of the tornado were caught by surprise.The justifications for this prohibition may sound familiar to those who remember the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when senior health officials repeatedly assured that risk to the American public was low.One skeptic of the weather community’s duty to warn of tornadoes argued that “the stoppage of business and the unnecessary fright” would be “worse than the storms themselves.” Another warned of the health hazards to people sheltering in damp basements.
A desire to prevent panic predominated — as it too often does in the case of outbreaks.Public health officials can learn from how the weather community corrected these mistakes.Today, a prohibition on storm warnings would be unthinkable.
When a tornado is sighted, push alerts light up smartphones, sirens sound from parking lots and ball fields and urgent warnings interrupt television programming.These precautions do not apply solely to clear and imminent threats.
Storm forecasters draw attention to hurricanes forming offshore well before the storms fully take shape, as they did last week with Hurricane Helene, updating the public as the threat develops and preparing them for protective action.Public health communications often take a different approach, choosing conservatism over a duty to warn.At the start of the 2022 mpox outbreak, U.S.
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