Dick Pountain/ Idealog309/ 4th April 2020 08:01:58
Stewart Brand’s famous epigram “Information wants to be free” has been our collective motto for the last three decades, but few of us remember that it wasn’t an isolated phrase and was accompanied by, for example, “The right information in the right place just changes your life”. During our current nightmare we’re learning that here in the world of matter many other things want to be free that shouldn’t, like serial killers and mosquitoes and viruses, and that controlling information about them has become critical.
Across the world governments and their health organisations are trying to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic but discovering that in the age of TV news and social media it’s impossible to hide anything. We’re witnessing a war develop between two ‘ologies’, epidemiology and social psychology. The coronavirus has very particular characteristics that seem designed by some malevolent deity to test the mettle of pampered citizens of post-modern information societies. There’s a malign cascade of statistical percentages. Some experts estimate that if we do nothing, around 60% of the world population would catch it – roughly the odds of a coin toss, Bad News. But if you do catch it 80% will experience nothing worse than a cold – Good News. But of the 20% who do have worse symptoms, anywhere from 1 to 5% will die, roughly the odds of Russian Roulette – Bad, Bad News. The virus is highly contagious and thus prone to spread exponentially, but not so lethal as to be self-limiting like Ebola or Marburg.
These facts have turned two issues into political dynamite, namely ‘herd immunity’ and virus testing. An exponential virus epidemic spreads rather like a nuclear fission chain reaction, and the way to control it is the same – by introducing a moderator that can reduce the flow of neutrons or virus particles between successive targets. In a viral pandemic herd immunity – that is, many people getting it, surviving and becoming immune – is the best such moderator, and is what happens most often. An effective vaccine is a catalyst that spreads such immunity more quickly and reliably. The problem is that unlike uranium atoms, human beings have minds, and the effect on those minds is nowadays more important than cold percentages.
The measures that are being taken by most governments are self-quarantine and social distancing (avoiding contact with other people) which act to moderate the rate of spread, in order to avoid swamping health systems with too many critical cases at once. In most countries these measures depend upon the voluntary cooperation of citizens. There are already tests for the presence of live virus, and there will soon be reliable tests for antibodies in survivors, but there’s controversy over how widely to apply them.
Epidemiologists need good data to check whether isolation measures are working, to get an accurate picture of the lethality rate, to model the spread and calculate how best to allocate finite palliative care resources. And, as American professor Zeynep Tufekci points out in The Atlantic magazine (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-models-arent-supposed-be-right/609271/), whenever a government acts upon the recommendations of the modellers, those actions change the model.
But citizens would very much like to know whether they have caught the virus and need urgent treatment, or had the mild form and are immune. It would technically be possible to test the whole population, but it’s neither economically nor politically sensible. The cost would be enormous, and it would conflict with the principle of isolation if people had to travel to test centres but impractical if testing vans had to visit every cottage in the Hebrides. Also no tests are perfect, and both false positives and negatives could have unpleasant consequences.So mass testing isn’t feasible and would be a poor use of scarce resources – but even if it were possible it might still be counter productive. Once everyone who’s had mild COVID-19 and achieved 'herd immunity’ knows that for sure, their incentive to continue with isolation might fade away, and worse still they might come to resent those who require it to be continued.
Masks are another psychological issue: medical opinion is that cheap ones aren’t effective and that good ones are only needed by those who deal directly with infected patients. But wearing even a cheap ineffective mask makes a social statement: actually two statements, “I care about me” and “I care about you” (which predominates in each case becoming obvious from other body language).
Perhaps the best we can conclude is that total freedom of information isn’t always a good thing in emergencies like this, but that social media make it hard to avoid. We’re slipping into the realm of Game Theory, not epidemiology.
