News and current events have a major impact on everyone. Failing to acknowledge these events can make you appear out of touch and uncaring, while acknowledging them can help people feel seen and heard.
The United States is in the middle of a complex web of Big Events: an economic crisis, COVID-19-related social distancing policies, severe income inequality and climate change that have combined to create a situation in which many people don’t know what their future will look like (see Figure 1).
These broad social changes created conditions in which young people whose parents had based their life choices on relatively secure jobs found themselves with few prospects. As a result, some turned to drugs and sex work as ways of earning money or buying food, and large epidemics of HIV, sexually transmitted infections and viral hepatitis broke out.
The effects of these Big Events are complex and contingent: wars, economic collapse, and revolts have sometimes led to huge outbreaks of AIDS, while other times they have not (see Figure 2). We know that many pathways variables influence whether or when a big event will lead to a high risk population such as drug users and sex traders or to an infectious disease epidemic based on famine or these or other social changes.
We’ve also learned that these pathways can involve bidirectional causation and uncertainty and feedback loops. This is especially true for processes that take place over time, such as the emergence of an epidemic from a large social change (like war or a pandemic). This article will explore the complexity of these causal patterns in order to better understand how to predict the health impacts of Big Events.