Social Distancing is just math

by | Mar 22, 2020 | Newton | 8 comments

The fewer the interactions, the sooner this is under control.

8 Comments

  1. Michael
    Michael on March 22, 2020 at 3:47 pm

    What’s the exit strategy for this shutdown? I subscribe to the Globe, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and LA Times, and aside from the predictable antisocial conservatives who’ve been insisting from the start that no response is necessary, I haven’t read come across any credible thinking on the subject.

    Will it have to last for only a couple of weeks, or for a year and half while we await the commercialization of a vaccine?

    If it only lasts a couple of weeks, then what happens at TCouple of Weeks + 1, i.e. the day when everyone is told to return to work and pack the D-branch to overcapacity?

    If it lasts for more than a couple of weeks, then what are the mitigation strategies for the massive increases in despair, financial ruin, foreclosures/evictions, depression, suicide, violent crime, disruptions to the food supply, etc.?

    So far the mantra seems to be “it’s anybody’s guess and we just need to get through this for everyone’s sake.”

  2. Donald Ross
    Donald Ross on March 22, 2020 at 6:09 pm

    The exit strategy is that we all (or ~70% or so of us to create “herd immunity”) catch it over a long enough period of time that we don’t overload the availability of ICU beds (/ventilators).

    You actually want to keep the hospital FULL, but not over capacity.

    Best case scenario feels like we begin to loosen lockdown late June. The economic and psychic damage will last a generation.

  3. Jack Prior
    Jack Prior on March 22, 2020 at 9:31 pm

    @Michael — As I saw in a response on twitter, “you should contact Coronvirus’s manager on that question.”

    China locked down Wuhan with an “iron hand” on January 24th. At the time, they had accumulated 41 deaths and 1965 cases. After 24 days they succeeded in leveling out the death rate at around 115 a day, and it started heading downward after 30 days on February 24th. They essentially eradicated it in another month. Wuhan ended its full lockdown after being locked down for about 10 weeks. The rest of the country was largely spared by travel restrictions and proactive lockdown and spun up their economy earlier, with extensive testing, temperature checks, and maximum social distancing at work.

    The US has been ramping crowds downward, but still isn’t in a full social distancing mode yet. We have accumulated over 400 deaths spread across the country with three major hot spots. Our death rate is currently about 50 per day and climbing 25% per day. We are unlikely to eradicate it until (1) we do unified and complete 30 day lock down, (2) we have herd immunity from 50-70% infections, (3) a vaccine gives herd immunity in 1-1.5years, or (4) it magically dies out in summer.

    Flu has an R0 of ~1.2 (each person gives it to 1.2 others). Covid-19 has an R0 estimated at around 3. Summer nudges Flu R0 down under 1 by either the natural social distancing of outdoor activities or the increased portion of time people are in hot/sunny conditions to weaken virus in environment. Most of us spend time in A/C heat so our bodies and the virus have no idea what is happening outside. It’s my guess that the R0 of Covid-19 is too high for the summer to push it under 1.

    We can achieve option 1 if we just surrender and say goodbye to at least 1% of the population, some already near death anyway, but many way before their time. Along the way, we also would lose some percentage of people to other health issues due to the swamped healthcare system.

    The 4th alternative is that we get to a stand-off with the virus with serious half-measures (compared against China), testing and temperature monitoring, such that the daily serious infection rate falls within the health care system’s ability to treat it along with other healthcare demands. Everybody that wants a fighting chance to live via ICU and ventilator, gets the chance to. Maybe therapies are confirmed that seriously lower the fatality rate. This seems like the most likely outcome.

    I think we all owe at least that to our fellow citizens. We are going to exceed that level in the coming days in New York and in my estimation not get back to it for quite some time (4 weeks at least). While 415 have died thus far, my estimate is that nearly 10x that number will die in the next 9 days. It will take time to turn the momentum of the infections in the pipeline and the further spread within quarantined households.

    Once we’ve turned the corner, we will likely have a period of returning to economic activity but retaining a significant level of discretionary social distancing with limited large group gatherings (which of course will continue to impact economy).

  4. Michael
    Michael on March 22, 2020 at 10:54 pm

    Thanks Jack, that’s extremely informative.

    My question wasn’t so much the crystal-ball scenarios of peak infections and fatalities, which as you say can only be answered by Coronavirus’ manager, but rather how long a $20 trillion economy can withstand a near-complete shutdown without inflicting irreversible, long-term social damage far in excess of what the virus would have.

    So far most of the real-time economic suffering has been limited to politically-disenfranchised hourly wage earners, while salaried knowledge workers have been minimally inconvenienced and in many cases have even welcomed the change-of-pace. But once the economic destruction of the last week is tallied up, a lot of heretofore financially-comfortable individuals will be quite worried for their own futures and the future of their children.

    The shutdown was actually a gift to my wife and me, who are fortunate enough to earn our livelihoods in sectors that are either insulated from the economic fallout of the shutdown or which have benefited from it, and I love the cleaner air and the safer roads for pedestrians and cyclists. I wish society would act with similar urgency and absolutism in response to climate change and motor vehicle fatalities. But realistically, the current economic, educational, and social shutdown is unsustainable.

  5. Jack Prior
    Jack Prior on March 23, 2020 at 7:16 am

    @Micheal – You raise good points. Society is always more focused on averting acute and perceivably addressable imminent deaths than chronic issues. I’ll always remember when the whole world stopped to focus on saving Baby Jessica from the well in 1987.

    One could argue China is much more focused on its economy than the health of its people based on its handling of the environment and work conditions, but they bit the bullet and got out of this will only 6 out of a million infected. Even if that is off by a few orders of magnitude, it’s pretty low, and mostly over for them for the time being, albeit with loss of limited freedoms.

    For us, we have to ask what our alternatives are. We could decide today that we can’t fight this and move on and let it “wash through”, but don’t think that would solve the economic problems. For many older Americans with discretionary income, this disease is terrifying, due to the risk to themselves or their parents. They would not going to want to give up discretionary social distancing. They will stay home and not spend. The workplace implications for putting employees at risk in this environment are complex. How would our healthcare workers (10+% of infections in Italy) or older teachers feel if the country wasn’t doing its best to protect them?

    • Marti Bowen
      Marti Bowen on March 24, 2020 at 1:54 pm

      Good information here. As for the end of the shutdown +1 day when everyone is going back to work that day. It has to be a more nuanced, complicated time period for people to go back to work, otherwise all of Michael’s dire predictions will happen all at once. Maybe it will have business phase workers back in. I don’t know but those scenarios would be just as bad for the psyche/economy as the shutdown.

  7. isabelle
    isabelle on March 23, 2020 at 10:04 am

    Sign the petition! Thank you, Amy!