In 1959, Charles Lindblom wrote The Science of “Muddling Through”, advocating an incremental approach to public policy and management. “Muddling through” does not work for pandemics. The science of pandemics is dominated by epidemiology, not behavioral science. The delay between policy decisions (or indecisions) and the resultant high UK death rate needs tracing back from the prime minister and his advisers to Cobra, the chief scientific adviser, and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. However, this is one form of contact tracing that can be delayed until the inevitable public inquiry.
Dr Duncan Robertson Fellow in Management Studies, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, UK
Narrator: This is you. You’re a match. And these are your friends. You catch the virus and you’re on fire. You’re too close – now all your friends are alight – you’ve infected them with the virus.
Tony, the Boy: Charley says that if ever you see a box of matches lying around, tell mummy because they can hurt you.
Narrator: We’d like the virus to spread slowly so to match the capacity of the health service. It takes a few days before your friends get ill, so you can’t see it spreading.
The virus is spreading rapidly so we need to slow it down. If you’re older or have an underlying medical condition, you need to stay apart.
That’s better. Keep apart. Treat everyone else as if they’re about to catch fire and you’re a lit match.
The real problem with Coronavirus Covid-19 is that when the health service becomes overloaded, the death rate goes up significantly. So, it is imperative that we keep the number of cases at any one time below or as near as possible to NHS capacity.
The Government’s model relies on shifting the peak. I am not clear that we are doing this fast enough. We are an outlier compared to other countries in our social distancing policy response.
There is a tension between epidemiologists – those who study how diseases spread (a very established science started around the time of the Spanish Flu 100 years ago), and behavioural scientists who study how people behave and react.
Epidemiologists have models validated against past pandemics. Behavioral scientists do not.
There are economic and social costs of social distancing. But if you delay social distancing too much, there are potentially very real human costs in increased mortality. Doctors will need to make very difficult moral decisions on who to treat and who not to treat.
I do not understand why, if the intention is to create herd immunity, why we are not isolating our vulnerable population, especially those in care homes.
Behavioral insights are great when you are trying to get people to pay their tax bills on time. And if people don’t, it doesn’t really matter. With a pandemic, if you get the timing wrong, more people die unnecessarily. Then you look back from your computer and say, yes, we got that behavioral model wrong while doctors and nurses on the front line are exposed to extra cases that could put their own lives at risk.
Here’s a video to show what we should be trying to do:
There has been much talk about using social distancing as a response to the Coronavirus outbreak. Here’s a video of how social distancing can be used:
Close Contact, where the population is infected very rapidly. This is not A Good Thing – the national health service is overwhelmed, and the death rate goes up as a result
Extreme Distancing, where the viral spread takes too long. This is not A Good Thing – the social and economic costs are huge
Optimal Distancing, where the spread is controlled and the human, social, and economic costs are optimized. This is A Good Thing. It is also very tricky to get right.
The United Kingdom is at a crossroads, an ideological battle between natural science and behavioral science. Let’s hope for all our sakes we get this one right.
Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, is facing a dilemma. When do we go from the so-called containment phase for controlling Covid-19 Coronavirus, to the delay phase.
In the medical / natural science corner, is the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, who has presented himself calmly, reassuringly, as completely on top of his brief. He is a physician and an epidemiologist (as well as a lawyer, and an MBA). His evidence at the newly formed House of Commons Coronavirus Committee was calm, frank, precise. He is exactly the sort of advisor that any government would be proud to have. Flatten the peak. Delay the virus spread. Keep the height of the peak low. Save lives.
Image: New York Times adapted from CDC/Economist https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/science/coronavirus-curve-mitigation-infection.html
In the behavioral science corner is, well, I am not sure who. Maybe it’s the Chief Scientific Advisor, who highlighted the need to take account of behavioral science. Yes, please do. It’s a wicked problem, and please include more complex social modelling.
But what we are now seeing is what the Director General of the World Health Organization (up until now also criticised for its seemingly political response to the issue) could be referring to as ‘alarming levels of inaction’.
I do hope, however, that Boris Johnson is being guided by the science, both behavioral and epidemiological, and not by advisors who profess to be superforecasters. You don’t have to be a superforecaster to forecast that if we get this wrong, many will die unnecessarily.
