A proper assessment requires knowing how well the measures will work, how long they will last and how they will be ended
choice,” said President Donald Trump on March 30th, after announcing that federal guidelines on social distancing would remain in force until the end of April. “Modelling…shows the peak in fatalities will not arrive for another two weeks. The same modelling also shows that, by very vigorously following these guidelines, we could save more than 1 million American lives.”
But as time goes on, “at what cost” will become easier to voice, and harder to duck. “We have no choice” will no longer be enough; as the disruptive effects of social-distancing measures and lockdowns mount there will be hard choices to make, and they will need to be justified economically as well as in terms of public health. How is that to be done?
If more data improve models, so does allowing people to look under their bonnets. The Dutch have published the details of the model they are using; so has New Zealand. As well as allowing for expert critique, it is a valuable way of building up public trust. Though the models differ in various respects, the sort of action taken on their advice has so far been pretty similar around the world. This does not mean the resultant policies have been wise; the way that India implemented its lockdown seems all but certain to have exacerbated the already devastating threat that covid-19 poses there. And there are some outliers, such as the Netherlands and, particularly, Sweden, where policies are notably less strict than in neighbouring countries.
Michael Greenstone and Vishan Nigam, both of the University of Chicago, have studied a model of America’s covid-19 epidemic in which, if the government took no action, over 3m would die. If fairly minimal social distancing is put in place, that total drops by 1.7m. Leaving the death toll at 1.5m makes that a tragically underpowered response. But it still brings huge economic benefits.
It is then that both politicians and the public are likely to begin to see things differently. David Ropeik, a risk-perception consultant, says that people’s willingness to abide by restrictions depends both on their sense of self-preservation and on a sense of altruism. As their perception of the risks the disease poses both to themselves and others begins to fall, seclusion will irk them more.
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