Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A Pretty Obvious Question About Social Distancing
We’ve been encouraged and/or compelled to adopt several behaviors, all of which are intended to help one avoid catching the Wuhan virus or, if one already has it, avoid sharing it with others. These behaviors, most of which are subsumed under the too-broad label of “social distancing,” include:
- wearing a mask when out in public,
- staying six feet away from others,
- avoiding large gatherings,
- washing hands frequently,
- working from home, and
- closing “non-essential” businesses.
The last of those is literally destroying the economy and literally impoverishing millions. The rest of them are, in comparison, inconveniences.
So here’s a question that I haven’t seen asked, but the answer to which seems critical to me:
Given that doing all of those things appears to effectively deter the uncontrolled spread of the virus, what proportion of the deterrent effect is achieved by the first five items absent the last, economy-destroying activity?
Because if we can get 80% of the benefit without destroying the economy… or 70%… or maybe 60%… then that suggests a pretty obvious strategy for moving forward. If we can do everything short of destroying the economy, and still avoid overflowing our hospitals, then we should get right on that. So it would be good to know the answer, at least approximately.
Published in General
I would argue that you can achieve #1-5 at about an 85% effectiveness rate without having to resort to #6.
Essential businesses are adapting, so as more businesses come back they will have models to follow. Clearly, certain jobs, like physical therapist, will have special challenges. Bordellos are doubtless looking for talent that looks fetching in an isolation suit.
Frankly, if we do the first five items well, we don’t need to do the last item.
Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that destroying is an acceptable term. I don’t, but it’s probably a distraction to argue its usage here without defining our terms.
The next question is the status of the economy with non-essential businesses open in appropriate locations in the country versus the status of the economy as we know it now. This question requires some guesstimates as to how much of the economy is actually going to be restored by virtue of those locations where it makes sense to open things up. Or how much are people still going to “stay home” because they still face some risk in patronizing businesses. Then there is the question of certain very populous eastern locations that contribute mightily to the economy where the time for “opening” may not be here yet.
Will the economy be as “destroyed” as it is now as we reopen? Likely not. Will we see a difference that’s as truly measurable as some would like us to believe? I have my doubts.
I think @spin is correct – but you’re right, although nobody can speak on this with facts: look at Rodin’s posts. And Mr. Giordano’s. There are basic assumptions and presumptions. And will be.
The benefit of closing businesses was lost when they decided to keep some of the major businesses open. Closing some businesses and keeping others open was a dumb idea and probably did nothing to reduce spread of infection. The policy should be abolished.
Closing down ALL of the businesses was never a viable option; was it? That’s not to say that I think what they chose was smart; I don’t. But if they were determined to close something down, there wasn’t any other way they could do it; was there?
Riding right along with the folks that say the virus is all a hoax are the folks that say the economic damage being done isn’t really all that bad.
A semantic, but important, point: we didn’t specifically “close non-essential businesses”. Instead, most states and countries have issued stay-at-home orders exempting essential businesses. In other words, the prohibition isn’t on businesses, it’s on going out at all. Non-essential businesses are collateral damage.
The reason the distinction is important is because when you view the last point as a general stay-at-home order, the magnitude of its effects dwarfs the effects of the other 5 on the list.
Another practical issue is that it’s fiendishly difficult to actually uphold a 6-ft radius at all times in public for anyone who doesn’t live in an exurb or less-dense area (which is less than half of the population of the US). It sounds feasible in theory, but experience shows that it breaks down eventually, either through unavoidable constrictions in stores, or just through a natural sapping of attention span.
In any case, though, the blanket bans will almost certainly prove to be 90% overkill. Very few infectious diseases are actually spread by all of the routes we’re inhibiting through stay-at-home orders. I’d bet dollars to French crullers that we will eventually discover that the virus is transmitted primarily through specific types of contact that are easily prevented in most settings without 90% of the measures currently in place.
But just like the old adage about half of every marketing budget going to waste, the problem is that we don’t know in advance which types of contact are harmless and which types are genuinely infectious. We still don’t have a good grasp on the extent to which the virus is spread through contact, droplets, or aerosols. We don’t know whether children are a major spreader of the disease. We don’t know whether distance to or time together with an infectious person plays a greater role in become infected. And since we can’t rule any of these possibilities out, the temptation to ban them all will remain very great.
The irony is that most of these questions cannot be answered in a laboratory – they are real-world questions that can only be addressed through real-world settings. Which means people actually going through the motions of daily life and potentially exposing themselves to the virus, so epidemiologists can go in afterward and sleuth around to determine why one person got infected and the person next to him didn’t.
But of course, none of that is possible as long as the world is on lockdown. We’re trapped in a vicious cycle of not being willing to loosen restrictions without better knowledge of how the virus is actually spread, and not being able to learn more about how the virus is actually spread without loosening the restrictions.
Items 2-5 fall in the category of things people were increasingly doing before the lockdown phase (which included closing many businesses, forbidding sale of some items, policing parks and leisure activities, making the default in life staying inside etc). In his recent posts @arizonapatriot provided some strong evidence which impacted my thinking on the subject, that those initial activities, more than the lockdowns that followed, were more important in controlling the spread of the virus. A similar argument is made in an article published yesterday in Public Discourse titled, Lockdowns Don’t Work, which includes further data analysis (and, in which the author includes public masking in potentially crowded areas as a non-lockdown method and which I think is one of the prices of getting us out of this situation). Figuring out the right way and priorities in unwinding what we have done is the next step. There are no unambiguous good or bad solutions here, we just have to manage with what we have in front of us now.
One example of why things need to change. We went into lockdown to, among other things, prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. In areas where the outbreak was severe we managed to do that, but much of the rest of the country was never in danger, at least so far, of being overwhelmed. However, we now face another urgent threat to the healthcare system because of the steps we took to preserve surge capacity. Unless people become less worried about going to the hospital or a doctor’s office, and hospitals are permitted to resume elective surgery, we are going to see hospitals and medical clinics start to close – we will end up losing capacity, instead of maintaining and expanding it.
UPDATE: Texas and California have lifted bans on non-emergency surgery.
Hank, good questions. I have no answers.
I haven’t seen any good information on the rate of spread of this virus. It’s typically characterized by the “basic reproduction number,” called R0, which is the expected number of cases generated by one case when the entire population is susceptible, though this is only part of the story. R0 has no time component, so the R0 figure by itself does not tell us the speed of spread.
I don’t think that we know whether some people are naturally immune to COVID-19. I don’t think that we know whether immunity even develops, though we hope and expect that it does. I don’t think we have a remotely accurate count of how many people have already been infected with the virus. I don’t think we know how many turn out to be asymptomatic, or have mild symptoms. To make matters worse, I would expect that both R0 and the rate of spread vary by location, so even if we had good data in my hometown of Tucson, it wouldn’t necessarily tell us much about NYC or Chicago or anywhere else.
Since we don’t know how fast the virus spreads without mitigation measures, we can’t evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation measures. I have no idea how we could come up with a viable way to calculate the effectiveness of various measures, at least not quickly or in an ethical way, even if we knew how the virus spreads without mitigation.
We could do experiments on prisoners or other undesirables, I suppose, but I don’t think that this would be ethical.
I think that the most important single fact that I would like to know is the proportion of people in NYC that have been infected. Right now, the reported figure at the NYC health site is 138,435, about 1.65% of the population, with about 15,000 reported deaths. There have to be more infections than positive tests, but is it 5% or 80%? Who knows? This information would let us know what we are facing, at least.
I have been fatalistic about this from the start. I do not expect that there is much that we can do to avoid many virus-related deaths. I suspect that we can slow the spread, but not stop it, which means that the deaths are eventually going to occur anyway. Adding an economic depression to such a disaster makes things worse, without helping much.
With the state of the data, however, I cannot demonstrate empirically (yet) that my suspicions are correct.
Roderic, I think that this is too extreme a statement. I would expect that partial closures would be partially effective. For example, closing restaurants and bars probably would reduce the spread to some degree. I don’t think that we have any idea of the effectiveness of a shutdown of everything, or of a partial shutdown, in a quantifiable way. It does make sense that lesser measures will be somewhat less effective than greater measures.
True. Let’s be clear, am I supposed to be in the latter category? Can’t tell.
I look fabulous in an isolation suit. Just saying.
Those experiments are occurring whether we commission them or not: almost 3/4 of the inmates in the Marion, OH prison have tested positive.
I don’t like taking a single extreme example and using it as a new benchmark, so I wouldn’t say we can expect 75% susceptibility among the public at large. However, it certainly casts a doubtful light on the “…..but only 20% on board the Diamond Princess got infected” meme.
There is a path, in theory, to avoiding those deaths: it’s full lockdown until cases reach nearly zero, then intensive test/trace/isolate (aka the S. Korea plan). Maintain this holding pattern of incredibly, artificially low R0 until a vaccine/therapy is available. Based on the last two months in S. Korea it’s theoretically feasible.
The problem is that we don’t have anywhere near the testing and tracing capacity nationwide yet. And by the time we get there, the economic damage may (*or may not, h/t Hoyacon) be exponentially greater than what we have now. And of course, if we lose the plot at any point before a vaccine/therapeutic becomes available, all those preventable deaths die anyway.
So yes, there’s a theoretical way to save those lives, and no, I don’t believe it’s feasible in the US. Germany is planning on going this route and might actually succeed.
Not in the US. You can’t shut everything down, so there was no point in shutting some businesses down. It’s like shutting the barn door half way.
I don’t doubt it, but you look fabulous in anything. Just saying.
I’m thinking about starting to wear a bandana everywhere, as a mask. I wonder if I should get a cowboy hat, too.
I loved hearing tonight, and it makes perfect sense, that the practices we’re following, especially washing our hands properly, will also lessen contracting of the next flu outbreak.
That’s what I’m doing, but my sun allergy dictated the hat long before the bandanna became necessary.
We don’t know and won’t know. We have to guess. Maybe when it’s all over maybe somebody will be able to quantify the effects within broad confidence intervals.
No, not saying it isn’t bad – just disagreeing with the term “destroyed”. Economies are the primary output of human activity. You cannot actually destroy an economy unless you have completed genocide.
And then left the area.
No humans = no human activity = no economy.
In a place where humans used to live this would equal a “destroyed” economy.
So yes, there has been serious economic damage. No, the economy hasn’t been “destroyed”.
I’m sure we’ll stay a step or two above the hunter-gatherer level, no matter what. It won’t be all bad. Mostly bad, but not all.
You tell me. It seems like you are obliquely criticizing Hank’s point, that there is significant damage to the economy. It does seem like you are saying the damage really isn’t all that bad. Today Intalco Aluminum plant here in northwest Washington announced they are closing their plant. That’s 700 jobs. That’s very bad.
I assumed you were probably thinking something like that, and figured I’d let it lie.
There’s a line in the old Warren Beatty movie Heaven Can Wait in which a journalist says to a corporate bigshot something to the effect of “Isn’t it true that an accident at your XYZ nuclear power plant could destroy southern California?” The corporate guy responds “I think you’d have to define ‘destroy.’ “
That’s what I thought. But that brings up another question I find interesting: How do you shut down a society entirely? People need to eat. They need medical attention at times. Things break and need to be fixed. Clothes need to be replaced. So how do you shut down a society entirely? Or can you?
After you wipe out all the private businesses it is ready to be turned into a socialist paradise. My suspicion is that that is why some people are so blasé about the economic damage. They may not have it as a conscious agenda, much less be part of a conspiracy, but they could be comfortable going forward without our system of private business. Others of us would be horrified.
The lockdown had a particularly salutary or destructive effect, depending on your viewpoint: it introduced fear into every interaction you had outside your home. It poisoned everything. It redefined every human interaction through the prism of personal survival, and turned everyone else into The Other. But we did not turn on each other, and we did not stone the sick in the public square; the fear was transmuted into a sense of civic responsibility, borne individually.
It seemed apt because the news was bad, every day, every hour. We huddled on the beach with umbrellas waiting for the tsunami. We got the point: this is serious.
But fear ebbs when the cause seems to recede. Doesn’t mean it’s over; doesn’t mean everyone should pack the bars and shake hands and lick the salt from the celebratory margarita off your fingers. But fear is exhausting, and the taste turns from bright to brackish. The legitimacy of the entire exercise fades with the fear, replaced by those most American qualities: anger, mockery, disobedience of kings, and a resolution to figure this out for our own selves, here, where we live and breath.
Or the size of “southern California”.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone (where people aren’t supposed to live, but the wildlife is exploding) is about 1000 sq miles.
That is ~1/4 the size of Los Angeles County, Ca. which is which has a land area of 4000 sq miles + about 700 sq miles of water. While Los Angelenos may define themselves as Southern California, much as New Yorkers see themselves as the center of civilization, it is a fair point to say that others differ in this view.
So the reporter in Heaven Can Wait is exaggerating both the degree of harm as well as the geography involved – he should have been mocked for his fatuous question.
I doubt this. Additionally, I really can’t see this happening, so not on the radar screen.