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Short thread RE: uncertainty and COVID strategy.
Some thought COVID was overblown and that an aggressive response was a wasteful overreaction. Some thought it was uncontrollable and we should just try to mitigate as population immunity accumulated. Both now look wrong, but...
Some thought COVID was overblown and that an aggressive response was a wasteful overreaction. Some thought it was uncontrollable and we should just try to mitigate as population immunity accumulated. Both now look wrong, but...
...let's suppose they turned out to have been right about the facts of the matter. Would they have been right about their proposed initial strategies? I think the answer is clearly no and that it's worth reflecting on the reasons *why* it is no
To do so, let's consider two academics both of whom have made their name by preaching uncertainty and criticizing the overconfidence of other intellectuals: John Ioannidis and Nassim Taleb. Both, of course, pointed out early in the pandemic that there was a lot we didn't know
But Ioannidis argued that this meant taking action to slow the spread was dangerous and unsupported by the science. Taleb argued that our uncertainty was *precisely* why we had to act immediately. As you might guess, I agreed with Taleb: https://twitter.com/dylanhmorris/status/1240391653996847108
What Taleb understood, and what public health officials in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam understood, was that there was an asymmetry between overreacting and under-reacting https://twitter.com/dylanhmorris/status/1239083541100728320
Even among people who thought COVID *wasn't* overblown, there were people were worried about "second waves" if we suppressed things too much in the early days. I felt this was penny-wise and pound-foolish
Why? Because our efforts to understand the pandemic, build healthcare capacity, develop antivirals, improve testing and tracing infrastructure, etc, don't magically stop while we're intervening. If you don't know, *buy time until you do know*. South Korea understood this.
I'm not alone in making these arguments. Besides those I mentioned, @joel_c_miller, for one, has been making them frequently, and very well. But I think it's still not being said enough. Buying time helps us save lives and save livelihoods/the economy. It's worth it
@fernpizza, @jplotkin, Simon Levin, and I have written a paper that touches on this, if you want to read more. As we say at the end, real world policy must emphasize robustness, not efficiency
https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02209
https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02209
