This weekend Naomi Davis, an influencer with nearly half a million Instagram followers, announced that she and her family were leaving their Upper Westside apartment, getting into an RV and traveling west.
She cited her children’s need for outdoor time and her family’s mental health as the reason they were leaving locked-down New York. Davis stressed they chose an RV so that they could avoid hotels and people. Her family left the city after weeks of officials asking New Yorkers to self-quarantine and just hours before the CDC recommended 14 day statewide quarantines for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
The reasons we all need to just stay home are well-documented by now. Asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus. Patient 31 in Korea proved that it takes just one carrier to infect thousands with the novel coronavirus. Communities already ill-equipped to deal with their own population can hardly stand the influx of more people. When you leave a hotspot like New York for a place with more fresh air (the virus loves air too), you are stressing systems that are not yours and have not prepared for you.
Examples of this abound. Sun Valley, Idaho, Summit County, Utah, Hawaii. Vacation spots up both coasts. They are all dealing with an influx of people who have decided to wait out a global pandemic in tiny towns with, at most, a handful of ICU beds. People traveling from New York aren’t just putting others at risk, they are also putting themselves at risk. Even RVs with full refrigerators need to stop at gas stations and so risk picking up the virus along their journey. The virus isn’t the only threat, there are stories about people with New York license plates being threatened with violence when they descend upon already exhausted towns.
I’ve lived in cities with my children for years. I know how quickly vibrant streets can close in and feel violent. I know from experience that living in a small space with lots of babies can feel oppressive even in the most filtered of times. The deaths in New York City are climbing. Recently the Javits Center was turned into a 2,910 bed hospital for the influx of severe coronavirus cases expected over the next few weeks.
Of course, Davis and her family wanted to jump into a RV and run away. Wouldn’t we all? Don’t we all? And given that we’d all be tempted to get into that RV, shouldn’t we just let it go? If Naomi were just another harried, worried mom and I’d just happened to see her climb into her RV as I walked down my city block, I’d say, Yes. We should let it go. I’d disagree with her decision, shake my head and chalk it up to the ignorance and selfishness of mostly good people in the face of really hard things. None of us are doing this perfectly.
Naomi is not just another anonymous worried mother. She’s an influencer. She’s made a career out of being influential. She and her husband maintain a beautifully appointed apartment in NYC with the money she earns from her influence. When she posts a photo of her family getting into an RV to go somewhere because she is as she told one follower, thinking “bigger picture with my little ones”, she is telling the people she has worked to influence for years that bigger picture thinking means ignoring the rules that would keep them safe. She is saying that thinking bigger means thinking of your own children to the detriment of others’ children. The consequences can be dire.
Influencing is all about numbers and engagement. So let’s use numbers and engagement to better understand what could follow. Based on her affiliations with brands like Target, I assume that when Naomi puts a sponsored post up on instagram more than 10% of her followers engage with the product she’s selling. But this was not a sponsored post and these are not usual times. So, let’s say just 10% of her 465,000 followers are influenced by her RV post and 10% of the influenced decide to follow her example. That’s 4,650 people. We know that 40–70 % of Americans will get coronavirus. Let’s be optimistic and take the low-end and assume 40% of those 4,650 people will get the virus or have it right now. Many of them are young, so they have a higher likelihood of being asymptomatic carriers. That’s 1,860 influenced followers with the virus. Coronavirus has a death rate of 1% to 3.5%. So of those followers, 18 to 65 will die whether Naomi gets into that RV or not.
But Naomi did get into that RV and much more critically, she posted about getting into the RV. So whether they eventually succumb to the virus or not, that 1% who followed her will spread the disease as they “think bigger picture” and stop sheltering in place. Scientists think every one person infected will cause 1.5 to 3.5 people to become infected. Since these followers have been influenced to move about the country and settle in new communities, let’s go with a spread of 3.5 new infections per influenced follower. That is 6,510 new people infected. 20% of those people will be hospitalized, which gives us 1,302 people checking into a hospital. Assuming a mortality rate of 3%, 195 of the 6,510 will die. That’s a lot of engagement.
These numbers of course do not account for the people who suffer accidents and illnesses that cannot be attended to because hospital beds are overrun with coronavirus cases. They also do not account for our changing understanding of the disease and its transmission — scientists now think it may be more infectious and more lethal that we previously thought.
Coronavirus is exposing all of us. Some of us are being exposed to the danger of systems that will not save us. Some of us are being exposed as having always been able to work outside those systems. Only the elite can get tested and only the elite can escape this virus. The yacht David Geffen retreated to comes to mind. Of course, to a single mother who has not been able to work a shift for two weeks an RV sure looks like a yacht. I’m not just talking about the mom in a garden level of a NY neighborhood the Davis’ left in their rearview mirror. I am also talking about the single mothers in the suburban and rural towns that RV rolls through and will eventually stop in. The single mothers who are running a fever, can’t catch their breath and cannot get care because their hospital has been stretched beyond capacity.
I can’t keep Naomi from getting in that RV. I don’t even know that I would if I could, there are parts of her story I do not know. But I do wonder if we ought to evaluate what it means to influence and to be influenced. Who is influencing me? And who do I influence? What obligation does someone like Naomi have to our society? Should she, at her detriment, shelter-in-place just because she can influence others to do the same? At what point should the influenced hold the influencers accountable? I don’t know. I can’t really blame her for not knowing either.
I also don’t know how many people packed bags and left cramped apartments after reading Naomi’s post. I do know the Davis RV has been on the road for a few days. By all accounts they’re traveling to a state where one of my immunocompromised loved ones lives. I find myself praying that her influence doesn’t reach them.