It seems like it’s mostly being taken as a given that we want to avoid panic. I’m sure avoiding panic is in fact desirable, but I don’t quite understand why that’s the case, so please interpret this post and my follow up comments as Socratic grilling. If there was panic, here is what I would expect:
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People would stay home as much as possible.
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This would involve some staying home from work, which would hurt the economy.
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There would be enough public support to get more government funding approved.
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With that money, they’d find a way to continue to provide core infrastructure to people. Eg. by simply paying workers more to go to work.
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There would be a huge demand for things like hand sanitizer and masks that wouldn’t be able to be met. So the government would have to step in and regulate those items.
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People would rush to the grocery stores to stock up, and stores wouldn’t be able to meet the demand. So the government would have to step in again, perhaps to restrict purchases and distribute food to people. But that seems like something that is doable. Eg. give everyone a big bag of rice and beans.
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With everyone staying home, it’d reduce the spread of the virus.
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Which would buy us time to produce more tests.
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Eventually we’d be able test the whole country and figure out who is infected and who isn’t.
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From there we can isolate and treat those who are infected.
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And once we do that, the risk of transmission will be much smaller, and we can start to move back to normalcy. Here is what I suspect might be wrong with that story I just told:
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Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to provide core infrastructure to people. Maybe I’m underestimating how many moving parts there are.
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Maybe the economic damage caused by all of this fear will really set society backwards.
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Maybe the government doesn’t have the authority to do a lot of the stuff I’m envisioning.
Several of your bullet points read "X goes wrong, until the government steps in". What makes you think the government is able to put out these fires at the same rate as people run into them? The government also just consists of people. Declaring a national emergency, regulating supplies and stores, testing the literal whole county and providing food and healthcare packages takes time, planning and frankly skill that I’m not sure governments have. That being said, I agree with quite a few of your points. But I think the negative impact of empty grocery stores, people hoarding hygiene products, shops closing because too many employees are staying indoors etc. will be very serious, and that it will take at least weeks before any centralised plan will be able to catch up with this.
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Declaring a national emergency is a huge cost for a country in general and a government in particular. I think the best way to look at this is that the converse state, "everything is fine please continue operating as normal", is a very profitable and desirable state, and you’re destroying that. At the very least this can disrupt economies and production chains, but also public trust (between members of the public, the public and industry, the public and government, the industry and industry, etc.)
Regulating supplies and stores is hard. How do you decide how much goes where, which stores need to stay open and which can close, how much to downsize your public transport and community spaces and services? How much extra money is this all allowed to cost? Below you mention to steve2152 that workers will keep working if you just increase their salary, but who pays for this (which department/ministry/bill in particular)? How high are the salaries supposed to be? How do new findings on the spread of the disease impact each of your answers, what are your tipping points for swapping to a globally different approach? Do you even have people at the right level of the chain of command to suggest these ideas (to be honest I’ve never heard of governments paying workers extra during national crisis to keep them working, outside of cleanup of nuclear meltdowns). On top of this I think governments have very little experience with epidemics like the one we are facing (globally) today. Like I said I think this is very hard, and if there wasn’t any particular reason for my government to sort all of this out beforehand, I expect them to not have this sorted out at all.
(On testing the literal whole country) I don’t know about the global situation, but at least where I live I know we’re not doing door to door screening (in fact, general practitioners over here are already overburdened right now, with only the paranoid fraction of the population asking for tests. Which, mind you, are currently being denied unless the doctor deems it reasonably likely to give a positive result). I think the idea of "Eventually we’d be able to test the whole country" is an extremely weak link in any public health plan, and simply is too ambitious to work.
Providing food and healthcare packages is also a massive coordination and transportation problem. Out of all the points I mentioned this might actually be doable(?), but it would still require massive resources (the food/medical supplies themselves, trucks, workers distributing them, people filling the packages, and even people planning what should or shouldn’t be in these packages, people coordinating internationally?). On top of that this plan incurs all the costs of the ‘national emergency’. Plus it’s not even clear to me how giving everybody a food and healthcare box will fix the epidemic, it sounds more like a stopgap measure to me (isolation in combination with this would be the real solution, but telling entire regions to self-quarantine is again incredibly expensive).
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Thank you, I appreciate it!
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However, my impression is that if P(>10% of the population is infected) is reasonably high — say, >25% — then the cost to the economy would be > tremendous, and it would be worth paying a huge cost right now to avoid that possibility.Are there any explicit approaches you’re thinking of that can be taken? Truth be told I don’t see how we would realistically stave off this scenario, other than the harsh quarantine measures that worked in China. This is (as far as I can tell) a main part of why so many people here are freaking out—we’re headed straight for this scenario and governments are not seeing the smoke. As an example, consider Italy to see the lack of preparedness to take action (closing off a massive region now because it’s too late to contain the Corona locally, 366 deaths total so far, leaked documents on containment causing people to move out of containment areas before containment set in).
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I would add that during a panic people tend not to listen to the government and all its actions to control the crowd are viewed as both harmful and dangerous to the people and, in standard mob mind think, get to "the government is doing this to us" and so really bad things start happening.
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In other types of panics I can see this being an issue, but here wouldn’t it just lead to more isolation? If not, can you be more specific about what bad things you envision would happen?
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Situations where the emergency policy is seen (correctly or not) as endangering a population (town, city, metro area) or preventing them from protecting themselves. Consider the dynamics in situations like Ferguson MO stemming from the way the government there dealt with the shooting of Michael Brown or the increasing escalation in Hong Kong. Both cases were actions supposed to be in the public interests but were not seen as such. However, I have also said that well done, emergency actions by government can actually reduce and alleviate panic/potential panic.
Here are a number of points:
People flocking to the hospital now to demand treatment for a simple cough, or for influenza, will overwhelm hospitals just when we need them most.
It’s far harder to do contact tracing and reaching out to the community to get them messages about what they should or should not do when people are panicking.
When there are sufficient supplies of things like food, like now, and people start hoarding, shortages become a self-fulfilling prophecy. (On the other hand, if there would be shortages anyway, then the only justification for encouraging hoarding is because you want to buy things instead of someone else who may need it more. From a utilitarian perspective, that seems obviously unjustifiable.)
"The government" in the US certainly doesn’t have the authority to do most of these things. Governors can declare a state of emergency on a per-state basis, but commandeering resources would still be hard to justify legally. They would try to do it anyways, but a state government doesn’t have enough people to actually do most of this.
Lots of essential industries like the water company and the electric company need other parts of the economy, like delivery trucks and computer-logistics systems to continue functioning. These can all break down in a panic. Worse, I’m very uncertain how robust the US economy is to shutting everything down, then trying to start back up.
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It sounds like a good idea, but won’t actually work in practice for most goods. Supply chain resilience is minimal, the demand would be near-global, rather than local and possible to fulfill via redicrecting supplies, and forecasting of supplies and just-in-time production requires far more warning than the current crisis allows for most goods. It’s not like there is tons of excess goods or farm capacity just sitting around to be used when demand suddenly jumps—and the dynamics in these systems can be messy.
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It seems to me that it doesn’t have to work for most goods. People can make do with eg. beans and rice for a while until things settle down. Would the government be able to distribute big bags of beans and rice to people?
Increasing perceptions of danger could lead people to refuse to take care of people they otherwise would have provided care for. This is undoubtably bad for the person who would have received care; whether it’s good or bad for society as a whole depends on the specifics of transmission and care.
Because people who think and act deliberately are less likely to blindly and actively hurt others than those who are acting on a fight/flight/freeze instinct. We are not evolutionarily equipped to handle threats of a nature such that:
it just doesn’t have a face to punch
running away is just going to result in the formation of dangerous migrating packs of sick monkeys spreading the problem around and looking for something with a face to punch
freeze looks like going about business as usual and ignoring the problem, which is good news for the invisible, unpunchable threat
Panic is what we call it when the elephant has gotten really freaked out and the rider stops trying to determine the best course of action in the face of what feels like an uncontrollable primitive mind. Panicky people tend to do stupid things like breaking quarantine, other-seeking for comfort, finding out those people are all panicking too and starting a riot instead of appropriate behaviors like staying inside whenever possible, making phone calls to authorities to report the riot outside, and washing their damn hands (and maybe sanitizing the phone as well).
I think it’s axiomatically better if people do stuff on purpose instead of acting out of animal fear. I’d even think this if people were choosing to do the wrong stuff due to, let’s say… inconsistent and unreliable messaging or something, because at least they’re thinking and acting deliberately which makes them less likely to do the stupid panicky animal things that confer no benefit but add needless harm to the problem.
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Maybe, and maybe. I would expect to see a range of responses from panicking people acting on all parts of fight/flight/freeze instincts. And I think bunkering down safe at home is certainly one possible freeze reaction. One likely flight reaction is driving/walking aimlessly "away" from the threat (think, "if I just get far enough away from the city I’ll be fine"). If enough people take the latter action, they are likely to meet up and start moving aimlessly as a group* despite the increased risk of infection ("Those people look healthy, and there’s safety in numbers"), and I think we all know how groups of humans can act. :(
*A group, BTW, with next to no planning or leadership structure, probably limited food and water supplies, not using sanitary facilities reliably, not washing their hands often, and most likely carrying lots of guns.
As for the army, if they were able to help at all I think it would be because they were following orders given to them by an officer who had the distance and training to be able to think more clearly. Would a military presence in the street scare more people into staying inside? Probably, and especially if there were clear instructions being broadcast at regular intervals. I’ve seen some people behave very well when you take their need to think out of the equation. On the other hand, you’re going to have the folks who freak out into fight mode because they think "they’re here to take our guns!" or some such, resulting in more needless deaths. Furthermore, mobilizing a military force mixes people around more and further exacerbates exposure risks. This is not a step I would choose to take at this time.
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Hm, it does seem likely that some people would flee, thinking "if I just get far enough away from the city I’ll be fine". And as jimrandomh mentions, this would lead to more spread of the virus. However, my intuition is that 1) there wouldn’t be too many people trying to flee, and that 2) deploying the army would make that risk trivial. My intuition could very well be wrong though.
By analogy: most of the deaths from the Spanish flu are believed to have been caused by over-reacting immune systems. Our global response to disease has the potential to cause more damage than the disease itself.
That is not necessarily what is happening—but it is a scenario we should be aware of.
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I don’t believe it counts as an allergy, but it was their own immune system overreacting. It’s called a cytokine storm.