refers specifically to viral pathogens, but epidemics don't have to be viral. Bacteria like streptococcus, the ubiquitous bug that infects human throats and causes the familiar childhood strep infection, and microscopic animals called protozoans, responsible for malaria, for example, can all move rapidly through human populations with devastating effect.
Those are just biological epidemics. We also now know epidemics can be behavioral and social, following the same organizing rules as purely biological ones. Authors such as Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who wrote a wonderful book called Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks, and Damon Centola, who wrote How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions, have revealed how behavioral epidemics both follow the rules of biological epidemics and also run counter to them in some ways. Although there are similarities and differences, the epidemics themselves are quite real.
These “believe-and-behave” epidemics are moving through our population with sinister effects. Opioid addiction is a classic example, but racism, antivaccine thinking, disinformation, QAnon, and online hate speech all follow the rules of epidemic spread within our human populations, apparently undaunted by our conventional efforts to stop them. Our social communities inherently unleash or corral ideas, insights, bias, and behaviors—voting tendencies, sexual practices, culinary recipes—much the way ecosystems unleash, stabilize, or inhibit infectious diseases.
Our communication technology has emerged as the double-edged sword to traffic both the profound evolution of ideas and the tragic deconstruction of social discourse. We once thought of epidemics as punishment from the Divine and then learned to triumph over them with vaccines and drugs. We now live in a world where the design of social media platforms both complicates our response to societal challenges and spawns whole clouds of thought and opinion, amplifying particular bits of information and—more ominously—disinformation. We have a measles vaccine, for example, that works well and can stop the disease of measles, a disease both highly contagious and significantly damaging. Unfortunately, we have a parallel epidemic of antivaccine thinking that undermines valid science and exploits vulnerable populations as effectively as any virus, leaving them swept with measles at a time when we have an effective vaccine to prevent it. Online, you can find both cogent scientific comment about the various COVID vaccines and maddeningly false but heavily trafficked myths about them. We've built a world where epidemics are inevitable and primed to be more explosive and more divisive.
We also know that where there is one epidemic, it's often riding on the coattails of another, or, if not, it spins off another one because of its own effects. Scientists call such pairings and linkages syndemics. Chlamydia and gonorrhea ride together, coexisting because of their similar method of sexual transmission. Similarly, COVID and obesity synergize in the United States, mixing to create a multiplying effect of severe illness, side effects, and death more pronounced than either would alone in the short term.8
Epidemics of skeptical mindsets and harmful behaviors have commingled amid COVID—those who thought the disease was a hoax were much more likely to flout practices that would limit its impact and spread, thereby unwittingly multiplying the phenomenon they didn't think was real. Because we do not pay so much attention to them when they're small and fragile, epidemics seem to just pop up, ooze under our doors, and grow. Once they get bigger and more widespread, they are much harder to reel back. Worse, epidemics spawn secondary epidemics. They literally multiply their own numbers and the numbers of problems they create.
We all want these epidemics to stop, to go away and never come back. But they don't. We have managed to eliminate a few, smallpox being the poster child for disease eradication, but most are stubborn and relentlessly reappearing. Influenza is a classic example, returning every year when the time is right. Equipped with maddeningly adaptive changes in its DNA sequencing that allow it to slip past both our engineered barriers—the annual version of the flu vaccine and our advocacy programs for getting a flu shot—and our bodily surveillance—our individual immune systems—it is relentless among us. There are other epidemics on which we have made great progress only to be foiled by an additive perceptual epidemic that has mitigated our efforts to stop the disease itself, as is the case with measles and antivaccine sentiment.
We've seen all these intertwined realities with COVID, and the take-home message for leaders is less about COVID itself, bad as it is, and more about the pattern of epidemic action in our social identity, large and small. We now know more about how epidemics rise, propagate, and abate, but the patterns are as timeless as biology, and they are not going away. The epidemics I was battling were not new to me or to science on my overwhelming night in the emergency department. We had been seeing gonorrhea, chlamydia, and influenza for years; we had also been seeing obesity, diabetes, domestic violence, and opioid use advancing across our populations.
It turns out epidemics are not just past and present; they are also future. Epidemics are not rare; they're common. Epidemics are not hypothetical; they're real. Born of disruption, they launch from a thousand places and cause more disruption. Epidemics aren't just throwing us into chaos but depend on and benefit from that chaos to rise and move. With our dense and redundant networks of travel, trade, and communication, we've built a world in which they will rise and rise again. They can and will be devastating.
Negative to Positive
After all the unwinding of what we considered stable and normal by COVID-19, the idea of emulating an epidemic, rather than fighting one, sounds almost sociopathic. Beyond understanding the dynamics of misery, is there anything to learn from these sprawling, creeping, relentless phenomena? Can understanding epidemics shed light on how we might lead positively, effectively, and exponentially in a world where disruption, velocity, and uncertainty bloom in the fields of “new normal” or the “new abnormal”? Can epidemics teach us, not just warn us? Can we learn to lead like them, not just in the face of them?
Yes.
Epidemics are not just negative and devastating; they can be positive and empowering. They surf on the same principles of social networks and multiply via the same organizing elements that leaders can use to positive advantage. What differentiates the value of an epidemic is its pathogen, its “disease maker,” the thing that is multiplied and spread across a population. While the duration of a pathogen's effects and how fast or slow it spreads are adjuncts of whether we see an epidemic as “bad” or “good,” the kernel of its value lies in its founding idea, which can unfold in unforeseeable combinations across populations. Bad ideas cause bad epidemics as they spread through our linked social networks, themselves powered by neural and technological networks; good ideas can seed good epidemics via the same approaches.
Ebola kills 50 percent, more or less, of the people who have it, and it's highly contagious, easily leaping from person to person unless you take active and repetitive precaution. Although we might consider a hypothetical disease called “Ebola lightweight” “better” if it were very difficult to pass from one person to the next and killed only 2 percent of those afflicted, the fundamental reality is that the Ebola virus is a recipe packet for human harm. On the other hand, innovation, collaboration, creativity, and empathy are action-ideas we would love to see bloom into epidemics in multiple places where they are currently missing. Although biological and behavioral epidemics are both different and similar, what differentiates bad and good is not how the epidemic organizes and moves, but what it carries. Positive epidemics carry good “pathogens,” or payloads, whereas bad epidemics carry bad ones.
As we might expect in a world filled with its share of ambiguity and trade-offs, some epidemics carry both. Malaria, for example, has the nasty effects of causing illness, organ damage, and death, but has also driven the genetic origin of a hemoglobin variant that provides resistance to malaria. That variant, in turn, carries the burden of sickle cell disease. Viruses themselves carry genes that have integrated into our own genome over generations.
