Covid analysis
I stopped blogging all the updates as they happened once it was clear the government was doing *something* which was probably the best for me. Now I'm catching up intermittently.
Smart, sensible people talking past each other
When the first cases started happening in the UK, some people didn't take it seriously yet, but it seemed like even people who did take it seriously operated from two completely opposite viewpoints and ended up talking past each other assuming the other person was just unaware of the basic facts the person trying to explain was using.
My viewpoint was a fairly simple one that I still think was mostly correct. I.e. "This disease was really bad in China and it was really bad in Italy, so it will probably be equally bad if it starts spreading here. And both of them tried to contain it. So probably we will do the same. And if so, the earlier the better."
But there's another viewpoint I think derived from actual epidemiologists, but filtered through government policy and popular press articles, which was something like, "if the disease is that infectious, it's not plausible to contain it. If it spreads through everyone, we should work out what limits the damage done."
The people with the second viewpoint I think had originally developed it producing models of diseases where shutting down every business in the country, or holding desperate delaying actions while all scientists worldwide worked on more accurate tests, were never even considered as possibilities. And they (or the people reading their models) hadn't updated their assumptions for "maybe we DO need to do that?"
The hole in my viewpoint was, admittedly, no country had an answer to what to do AFTER lockdown yet. I hoped SOMETHING would happen, a test, a vaccine, a better understanding of what distancing measures worked.
So there were a lot of frustrated articles written, by the second viewpoint, taking it for granted that OBVIOUSLY it would infect everyone, and explaining it patronising detail why, if so, it was better to delay lockdown to flatten the inevitable peak rather than do it too earlier.
And there were a lot of desperate blog posts written by me asking, "ok, ok, if you're accepting 1% of the country are going to die and try to minimise the damage a cursory glance at Italy would show what the peak was going to look like... where is the war mobilisation? Where is the moats round nursing homes with airdropped supplies? where are the factories frantically churning out masks and ventilators in advance of the onrushing peak? Where was the 'in 1 month we'll need ocado for the entire country for every grocery shop, the government is providing XXXX to ramp up delivery capacity' campaign?"
I think a lot of people who were good at this understood, but what they understood didn't percolate out to where I could see it. People talked about it being inevitable, but didn't talk about what actions would make sense THEN. I don't think there was any interpretation where "let's delay for two weeks and see what happens before trying to ramp up preparations" was a sensible conclusion. Even if you're delaying lockdowns, if their plan was "1% of the country is going to die", you'd need SOME preparations in advance.
Neither side seemed to actually hear each other, nor be able to explain what the other side had failed to consider, because the conclusion of accepting both was so unpalatable.
But of course, "lets delay for a bit" was exactly the government reaction as far as I can tell. They were still in "don't worry your heads about it" mode when it seemed obvious to a casual analyst that it was *probably* serious. Maybe there was some secret plan that made that make sense? Or more likely they were just bad at running the country and responding to public opinion not to the facts.
I was so scared they were going to sleepwalk all the way into a massacre, I was so relieved that they woke up and started acting only a few weeks late. But I still think it's terrible that they didn't act earlier. Every country could see exponential curves happening. They didn't seem to be making serious preparations but communicating to avoid panic. Rather it seemed like Johnson was just clowning his way through it like he always did.
What I still don't understand was that, there were serious, smart, senior, respected scientists involved. Actual epidemiologists. I understand how the government might be working on an out of date model which made sense given its assumptions but didn't apply to the new reality. But how did no-one from either the government or the scientific teams realise we were likely to end up about where we are now and say so? My analysis at the time was confused by the chance there was something big I wasn't seeing. But now it seems like, it pretty much was exactly what it looked like, that drastic lockdown was needed to avert a catastrophe, and we didn't have a way of exiting that, but we were inevitably going to try delaying as long as we could and hope SOMETHING came up anyway.
Flattening the curve
That also puts a very different complexion on the 'flatten the curve' rhetoric. I think that was excellent insofar as (a) it led people to think about acting quickly without panicking (b) was true, however bad the curve would be. But it wasn't so much true, as the mostly-accurate but somewhat-misleading article 'the curve is a lie' pointed out. Specifically, the curve would have to be flattened over a decade or two to actually keep the demand for ICU beds below the supply. Or so my back-of-the-envelope figures showed at the time, but I didn't have faith that I was right.
Of course, my figures are probably all out of date I didn't have good data. But I'm not sure if that affects these conclusions.
You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1119003.html using OpenID.
comments so far.
Smart, sensible people talking past each other
When the first cases started happening in the UK, some people didn't take it seriously yet, but it seemed like even people who did take it seriously operated from two completely opposite viewpoints and ended up talking past each other assuming the other person was just unaware of the basic facts the person trying to explain was using.
My viewpoint was a fairly simple one that I still think was mostly correct. I.e. "This disease was really bad in China and it was really bad in Italy, so it will probably be equally bad if it starts spreading here. And both of them tried to contain it. So probably we will do the same. And if so, the earlier the better."
But there's another viewpoint I think derived from actual epidemiologists, but filtered through government policy and popular press articles, which was something like, "if the disease is that infectious, it's not plausible to contain it. If it spreads through everyone, we should work out what limits the damage done."
The people with the second viewpoint I think had originally developed it producing models of diseases where shutting down every business in the country, or holding desperate delaying actions while all scientists worldwide worked on more accurate tests, were never even considered as possibilities. And they (or the people reading their models) hadn't updated their assumptions for "maybe we DO need to do that?"
The hole in my viewpoint was, admittedly, no country had an answer to what to do AFTER lockdown yet. I hoped SOMETHING would happen, a test, a vaccine, a better understanding of what distancing measures worked.
So there were a lot of frustrated articles written, by the second viewpoint, taking it for granted that OBVIOUSLY it would infect everyone, and explaining it patronising detail why, if so, it was better to delay lockdown to flatten the inevitable peak rather than do it too earlier.
And there were a lot of desperate blog posts written by me asking, "ok, ok, if you're accepting 1% of the country are going to die and try to minimise the damage a cursory glance at Italy would show what the peak was going to look like... where is the war mobilisation? Where is the moats round nursing homes with airdropped supplies? where are the factories frantically churning out masks and ventilators in advance of the onrushing peak? Where was the 'in 1 month we'll need ocado for the entire country for every grocery shop, the government is providing XXXX to ramp up delivery capacity' campaign?"
I think a lot of people who were good at this understood, but what they understood didn't percolate out to where I could see it. People talked about it being inevitable, but didn't talk about what actions would make sense THEN. I don't think there was any interpretation where "let's delay for two weeks and see what happens before trying to ramp up preparations" was a sensible conclusion. Even if you're delaying lockdowns, if their plan was "1% of the country is going to die", you'd need SOME preparations in advance.
Neither side seemed to actually hear each other, nor be able to explain what the other side had failed to consider, because the conclusion of accepting both was so unpalatable.
But of course, "lets delay for a bit" was exactly the government reaction as far as I can tell. They were still in "don't worry your heads about it" mode when it seemed obvious to a casual analyst that it was *probably* serious. Maybe there was some secret plan that made that make sense? Or more likely they were just bad at running the country and responding to public opinion not to the facts.
I was so scared they were going to sleepwalk all the way into a massacre, I was so relieved that they woke up and started acting only a few weeks late. But I still think it's terrible that they didn't act earlier. Every country could see exponential curves happening. They didn't seem to be making serious preparations but communicating to avoid panic. Rather it seemed like Johnson was just clowning his way through it like he always did.
What I still don't understand was that, there were serious, smart, senior, respected scientists involved. Actual epidemiologists. I understand how the government might be working on an out of date model which made sense given its assumptions but didn't apply to the new reality. But how did no-one from either the government or the scientific teams realise we were likely to end up about where we are now and say so? My analysis at the time was confused by the chance there was something big I wasn't seeing. But now it seems like, it pretty much was exactly what it looked like, that drastic lockdown was needed to avert a catastrophe, and we didn't have a way of exiting that, but we were inevitably going to try delaying as long as we could and hope SOMETHING came up anyway.
Flattening the curve
That also puts a very different complexion on the 'flatten the curve' rhetoric. I think that was excellent insofar as (a) it led people to think about acting quickly without panicking (b) was true, however bad the curve would be. But it wasn't so much true, as the mostly-accurate but somewhat-misleading article 'the curve is a lie' pointed out. Specifically, the curve would have to be flattened over a decade or two to actually keep the demand for ICU beds below the supply. Or so my back-of-the-envelope figures showed at the time, but I didn't have faith that I was right.
Of course, my figures are probably all out of date I didn't have good data. But I'm not sure if that affects these conclusions.
You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1119003.html using OpenID.
comments so far.