Coronavirus: The Best Strategy May Not Be As Obvious As You Think

I think the safest thing we can say about the coronavirus problem is that it's too complex for anyone to fully understand. If you try to measure on a scale of 0-100 what you think the national response should be (pretending you don't know full well that the government can't do anything like as much as people think), where 0 is 'carry on as you were and do absolutely nothing', and 100 is 'the country in near lockdown', the right response rating is going to be somewhere between 0-100. But not only is it the case that no one knows exactly what the right number response rating is, it's also inevitable that the right number response rating changes each day with each changing situation.

The situation today is roughly as the epidemiologists predicted - the virus has spread considerably and will infect many more people as it heads towards its peak. We also know that the coronavirus is growing exponentially, and that the earlier the countries responded with things like social distancing and self-isolation, the slower the spread of the virus.

For some, it seems obvious – the UK government has made a huge blunder by not reacting earlier to encourage social distancing and putting us in lockdown. But as I said, this problem is highly complex, and just because some countries slowed the spread of the virus by acting early, that doesn't mean every country should do the same.

Here's why. Let me tell you a few things we don't know. We don't know how many people in the UK have the coronavirus, we don't know the dynamics of exactly how it will spread, or exactly how fast, or among whom, nor the patterns of immunity, nor the complex dynamics of knock-on effects. But I can tell you two things I do know with a reasonable degree of confidence.

First, you as an individual know your own cost-benefit ratios for every social situation better than anybody else. If the benefit of a particular event of social interaction isn't significant to you, then stay at home. And like a sorites-type analysis (when does a heap become a heap?) the older you are, the more important this cost-benefit consideration becomes. Don't take unnecessary risks for relatively small gains. There are so many positive things you can do when you're self-isolating - things that really matter; prayer, meditation, contemplation, reading, learning, family relationship-building, writing emails to friends, catching up on jobs your future self won't have time to do when things are busier, you name it.

Second, in case anyone isn't entirely clear on this, the reason people shouldn't panic buy isn't just because we should all be kind, thoughtful citizens who need to be mindful of the negative effects on society's most vulnerable (although that is a good enough reason in itself). No, it's also because, even if your short-term interests are narrow enough to stockpile, and you think it's wise to only look after yourself and your immediate family, you'll very likely go on to hurt your future self and your future immediate family too in the long run, because further down the line everyone's well-being and stability is both proximally and distally connected to everyone else's. 

To see why, imagine if panic buying yields something like a Pareto distribution (otherwise known as the 80/20 rule - roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes), where a high proportion of the necessary goods are stockpiled by a small proportion of the people - it could slowly knock-on to retard the supply and demand distributions across the UK, until it hurts people the stockpilers also rely on. Somewhere down the line, the teachers, nurses, bus drivers, shop assistants and delivery drivers might pay the price of your stockpiling in a way that snaps back to undermine the supply chains to the goods and services on which your future self and your future immediate family will also rely. The economy needs to stay as stable as possible, and the supply and demand links must flow as steadily as possible for the good of everyone. Everyone carrying on only buying what we need is a good way to help this stability.

Nobody, including me, knows exactly the best way to tackle the coronavirus outbreak in exactly the right way with exactly the right courses of action at exactly the right times - and anybody that tells you otherwise is either a liar or deluded. But I'm going to make a suggestion that has a good chance of being somewhere near right. Just like the damage to the supply and demand chains I mentioned with the panic buying, it is also probable that short-term overreactions in terms of obstructing economic activity could decimate the economy in the longer term in ways that could harm society even more than the eventual medical effects of the coronavirus.

In other words, if you’re faced with the prospect of an economic recession (x) and a mass infection (y), you are only realistically going to see one of the following outcomes:

1) No x and no y

2) X but no Y

3) Y but no x

4) Both x and y

If we assume that 1 simply isn't going to happen, that it seems fairly certain that y is going to happen (which also rules out 2), and agree that 4 is cleary the worst scenario and the one we really want to avoid most, then it's clear that number 3 would be our least bad of all the realistic scenarios. Like everyone else, I do not know if we can achieve number 3, and even if we could, I'm not even sure how we could achieve it - but if there's an outside chance that in the medium to long term the probability of an utterly decimated global economy could be traded off against a slightly larger set of infected people in the short term, then it's possible that not going into a complete shutdown is something our future selves will thank us for in the long run.

Given that a lot of people are going to be infected, they can either be infected with a decimated economy, or with only a badly hit economy, and it isn't easy to know how bad the economic damage will be, or the rate of the spread of infection, because the further into the future we try to go with our predictions, the greater the possibility of margin of error. But equally, it isn’t obvious that we could have realistically stopped an exponential spread, given that we don't have an authoritarian political system, and that so many infected people remained under the radar, so there might be some unseen wisdom in the government's current strategy, even if it seems to many quite counterintuitive.

The upshot is, even though the natural instinct might be to try to protect everyone by mass isolation and shutting down large swathes of our industry, it really may not be the best medium to long-term strategy for maximising human utility. The best response might well be a mass bottom up approach whereby people act on new information in accordance with a medium term strategy that maximises the immediate interest as best they can. So for example, we know age determines risk of death, which means older people should act in conjunction with the greater risk their freedom poses. For now, don't go to places you don't need to go to, don't put any unnecessary strain on the NHS, and assume the conditions that minimise your chances of infection with the optimum trade off in a way that maximises value for you and your loved ones in the short term but also for the medium to long term strategies of our future selves. 

To see why this might be the best approach, consider an illustration. The economy is finely balanced with a delicate framework of connectivity- it took hundreds of years to evolve and develop. It is a bit like a well-functioning brain, and a damaged economy is a bit like the process of necrosis, which is where cells are damaged by things like infection, inflammation, injury, blood flow or trauma, leading to overall cognitive impairment. The more the brain is damaged by necrosis, the worse the cognition becomes, and the worse it can become still.

Damage to various sectors of industry could work in a similar (although not exactly identical) way. The more the supply chains are undermined, the more barriers to trade emerge, the more income lost, the more people are out of work, the bigger the economic damage - and once an economy becomes damaged to that extent, it could quite easily set off a kind of social butterfly effect of shortage, hunger and mass deprivation that governments are powerless to repair, and from which humans find it difficult to recover quickly. 

The safest bet is we'd do well not to over-react or under-react, and we'll do even better if we don't get the balance of our short-term and medium to long-term trade offs wrong - but as for the right measure, it's difficult to say on any given day.