People felt it…

Michael Lewis' book "Premonition" follows a small team of people who’ve been tasked with determining what measures to enact nationally should a pandemic like the 1918 flu occur.

The team discovered that closing schools and social-distancing worked and the statistics they presented were indisputable – those two strategies were fundamental to preventing a virus from infecting large numbers of citizens.

Even so, public health officials were reluctant to get on board with these measures regardless of what the numbers said.

Lewis writes: “There’d come a moment when [the team] had almost given up. Afterward they’d decided that, rather than try to change people’s minds, they ought to try changing people’s hearts. [The team] ceased their appeals to reason and began to appeal to emotion – which is to say [they] stopped making an argument and began to tell a story.”

Lewis describes a key meeting of local health officers from around the country who had gathered to determine what measures to implement in the event a pandemic broke out in the US.

After the initial presentation focusing on closing schools and social distancing, the local health officials began to voice the usual list of objections.

What story could the team tell in order to reach the hearts of those officials and shift their mindset ?

“How many of you have children or grandchildren?” asked the presenter.

Nearly all hands went up

“If there’s a pandemic anything like the one in 1918, how many would send your kids to school?”

Only one hand was raised and then sheepishly lowered.

Lewis writes: “That was the moment that … people felt it. They stopped thinking like social justice warriors and became parents.”