Many nurses have called for lockdowns. We who value freedom and human dignity are dismayed that media and politicians have used these siren calls to leverage the destruction of basic constitutional protections against arbitrary government force.

Across the globe, people were told they cannot go to work, send their kids to school, attend a gym class, open their business, or even visit the playground. To justify this horrific government overreach, news and social media portrayed doctors and nurses crying and pleading for the public’s compliance.

We must take a critical look at these fallacies of emotional appeal and bias.

An ICU nurse says, “If you had to see someone struggling to breathe as I have, then you would understand! I’m working on the frontline where people are suffering! You’ve never had to hold someone’s hand while they take their last, dying breath! Please stay home for my sake and yours!”

Such whinging and pleading is a brazen appeal to emotion. By implication, because of suffering, basic principles of freedom must be squashed.

Guilt, anxiety, and fear are very powerful negative emotions. Consider the statement: “Who are you to think you should be allowed to get a haircut when it could result in someone stuck on a ventilator in the ICU!” A statement like this arouses feelings of guilt.

Positive emotions can be weaponized too. An appeal to empathy or compassion comes in the form, “It might break your heart to see your children deprived of their little-league sports and forced to wear a mask, but just think about the elderly people or those with comorbidities, we need to care about them, not just ourselves and our children.”

In the above examples, appeal to emotion can override our sense of what is true. Hence, critical thinkers must ask questions of cause and effect. Does getting a haircut or my child playing T-ball truly cause someone to get stuck on a ventilator and die in ICU?

Seeing someone struggle to breathe and require invasive medical procedures is stressful and perhaps traumatizing for nurses. However, dealing with these challenges is what critical care nurses signed up for. Yearly, critical care nurses and doctors might spend hundreds or thousands of hours in the presence of acute suffering where people are in pain and cannot breathe properly.

Understandably, experience shapes the perception of reality. In the context of Covid-19, the ICU nurse is spending their time seeing the worst of the worst victims. For multiple twelve-hour days a week, month after month, an ICU nurse sees the worst cases possible.

Seeing this devastation can lead to a cognitive bias. False extrapolation leads to the emotional conclusion that all cases look like this. Even though objective data demonstrates a recovery rate of well over 99% for Covid-19, the ICU nurse is immersed in a context, day after day, where everyone is extremely sick and potentially dying.

Witnessing the worst-case scenarios and a constant media and political campaign of Covid-19, some nurses are tempted to go to media and emotionally bloviate about the need to “stay home and save lives” while neglecting the broader, negative impacts of prolonged shutdowns of society. But this kind of bias is not unique to the pandemic.

For example, many obstetricians and maternity nurses believe home birthing children should be banned because they routinely witness worst-case birthing outcomes while ignoring the inherent risk associated with hospitals. Many pediatricians believe backyard trampolines should be banned because they treat the worst-case outcomes of trauma while ignoring the broader context of joy and exercise they provide.

Sound public policy requires seeing the forest for the trees. With Covid-19, our constitutionally protected freedom has been severely damaged by amplifying the cries of nurses working among the sickest trees while ignoring the health of the forest.

Andrew RN, ICU/ER | CanadianFrontlineNurses.ca