The clear strategy being used to encourage hold-outs to get the Covid vaccine relies on the power of storytelling. Journalists/interviewers connect with patients who are lying in hospital beds and who are willing to share their fears and regrets.
The most effective of these videos and written reports incorporate some personal background and some references to other family members. Then the inevitable statements like, "I never thought I would get sick" and "I doubted how widespread the virus was."
Those, by themselves, are unsupported claims. The power of these testimonies lies in the support, in the shared worries and hopes of readers/viewers and those giving the testimony.
For some people, the statistics and the advice of experts is enough to persuade. But for everyone, nothing beats a good story, one with a setting, characters, conflict, and resolution.
These Covid stories tend to feature hospital rooms with lots of tubes and machines. The characters are the suffering patient, with off-stage appearances from grieving and worried family members. The conflict is obviously the collision of human and disease.
Unfortunately, the most powerful of these stories end with death as the resolution, though we all realize that death will not end the suffering of those who loved the folks who gambled and lost.
We are now at 75 percent of American adults with at least one shot.
The power of stories may yet produce happy endings.
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