Questions from a commenter

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The commenter asks,

I sometimes wonder, if it was 2007 (pre-iPhone) vs. 2020, would we have reacted the same way? Would it have been worse and for whom?

2020 seems to be predicated on two guiding principles:

1) the enduring belief in models to guide public policy regardless of their underlying ability to accurately predict actual outcomes to within any degree of accuracy

2) the always connected smartphone with never ending updates.

A few thoughts.

1. I think it is too early to say whether computer models helped, hurt, or made little difference. My bet now would be on “made little difference.” I think that most policy makers, including those in European countries, had to see with their own eyes what happened in Italy and New York before they would react. Asia was a different story, in part for cultural reasons but mainly because the SARS precedent made a more profound impression there.

2. I don’t think that the pre-iPhone reaction would have been the same. I take the view that our current technology blurs what used to be a distinction between our intimate world and our remote world. It used to be that our intimate world was our family, friends, and co-workers. We saw them in person. The remote world was celebrities, politicians, and people in the news. We saw them on television or in print.

Now, our intimate world and the remote world both show up on the same screen. We feel a compulsion to try to be celebrities in our intimate world (worrying about whether our friends “like” our posts on Facebook or Instagram) as well as a compulsion to become involved in the remote world.

During this crisis, I myself have torn down the barrier that I used to put up to prevent me from becoming too involved in the remote world. That is, I used to write a blog post and schedule it to appear two weeks later. Instead, I am writing blog posts to appear within hours, or even minutes after they are composed.

I think that the current media environment puts tremendous pressure on policy makers to appear to be doing something, and doing it quickly. Pre-2006, I don’t think that you get daily briefings led by the President.

The pressure on policy makers to react quickly may do more harm than good. Reacting quickly is not the same thing as making the best choices based on available information. In fact, it may be the opposite. In a pre-iPhone environment, maybe you don’t have Dr. Fauci making light of the problem by saying that young healthy people should be willing to go on cruise ships. Maybe WHO would have made its presence felt more on the basis of the epidemiology of its scientists than on the ideology of its upper echelons Maybe Congress would have been patient enough to come up with bill that more effectively addressed the problems of economic dislocation caused by the virus, rather than passing the worst legislation in history.

On the other hand, I think that the private sector was able to react more constructively than would have been the case 15 years ago. Individuals and firms knew enough to overcome bad regulations, either by ignoring them or shaming the government into dropping them. Weeks before government stepped in, many businesses canceled conferences, sports teams canceled games, and many of us adopted social distancing.

So I don’t have an overall evaluation of whether we are better off or worse off having our current media environment.

14 thoughts on “Questions from a commenter”

    • There’s no way you can say that H1N1 caused greater health damage than covid. I recall no stories about greatly overcrowded hospitals and ICUs. And in the end the estimated fatality rate for that pandemic was quite a bit lower than the estimated fatality rate for the regular seasonal flu.

      • “There’s no way you can say that H1N1 caused greater health damage than covid.”

        I’m fairly certain that he did not say that.

        As an aside, most of the COVID models in the U.S. got the number of needed hospital beds and ventilators massively wrong. But, nearly everyone assumed that the models must be right, because the technocrat experts trusted them.

        • I think he did say that. But I agree completely that the need for hospital beds and ventilators have been greatly overestimated. Not sure why the experts have been getting that so wrong, but I did just see an article saying that the policy in Lombardy was to hospitalize an unnecessarily large number of the infected, so maybe that’s why their hospitals were so swamped. And maybe that in turn increased all the estimates of what would be needed.

          • To me, 150,000-500,000 people dying is a greater toll than 100,000. Even if the lower number makes healthcare workers job harder. So I guess I did say that!

            I do agree in not recalling many stories about it. Definitely a lower volume news environment, plus we didn’t have a bunch of H1N1 infection trackers plastered everywhere for us all to watch in real time.

          • Charles — those numbers aren’t comparable. One is for the entire swine flu pandemic, but we are at best halfway through this pandemic. Probably less.

          • Fun fact: in the 1918/19 flu pandemic, the second wave in fall 1918 was the most deadly. I hope that’s not the case this time, but the point is that we still have a long way to go with this pandemic.

      • On Sunday afternoon, February 2, I ended up in the emergency room at Mt. Sinai West, one of NYC’s largest and best hospitals. There was no Covid-19 problem then and yet the hospital was so swamped that I had to spend a almost two days in the ER as there were no beds. In addition the ER itself was swamped with two patients in each normally single occupancy cubicle. If a hospital can’t average 85% occupancy they’re headed for bankruptcy hence it doesn’t take a pandemic to cause “overcrowding.”

  2. The internet, virtual-meeting softwares, and online entertainment probably have had a major impact on pandemic policy, and on prudential behaviors. These technologies enable a broad segment of elites to work from home, and the many to stay virtually “connected” and distracted. Absent these technologies, lockdown and economic shutdown probably would have been more controversial, and more difficult to enforce.

  3. “On the other hand, I think that the private sector was able to react more constructively than would have been the case 15 years ago.”

    Might well be true. But, as a counter example, I do remember Home Depot and many others in the private sector that were able to react quite effectively after Hurricane Katrina vs. FEMA. Does anyone still remember Mike Brown aka Brownie?

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