I gotta say - perhaps one of the greatest popular misconceptions on COVID is the belief that Florida has minimal transmission-reduction.

A post-immersion thread on multilevel management and trust with implications for the science-policy interface

1/ https://twitter.com/Alex_Washburne/status/1385254413900546050

Realizing that Florida is well-managed is important: DeSantis’ chose to prioritize protecting nursing homes instead of closing businesses, and businesses + people stepped up to manage transmission in their own facilities & capacities. County-wide mandates abound.

If you want to study unmitigated COVID scenarios in the US, Florida is not the state to study. Floridans stepped up and have developed social norms, business practices & a mosaic of county-level management interventions that makes it far more mitigated than even Bozeman, Montana.

Living in Montana and traveling to climb across western states during COVID revealed a patchwork of COVID interventions. The rule I see is that large urban areas all have tight rules thanks to business mandates, and rural areas w/o chains have low adherence to CDC recommendations

No moralizing here, just pointing out something that’s important for my own research into the determinants of COVID outcomes and for future reference on the effective levels of US pandemic management (personal responsibility, social norms, counties, states, businesses & federal)

The power of corporate action and social norms from a distributed web of local leaders cannot be underestimated for this large & heterogeneous country. While Rapids City council debated masks, people already needed to wear masks to get Starbucks or shop at Safeway.

Universal Studios Orlando had the highest mask-wearing adherence I’ve seen - people wearing stars & stripes masks on outdoors roller coasters because that’s the rule.

Cuban Tamiami had nearly universal mask compliance and signs in Spanish about masks, vaccinations, etc.

People came to party in Las Vegas, Nevada, with masks and all. In Albuquerque and Navajo Nation, masks were everywhere, but in rural counties S of ABQ there were massive rodeos without masks. Idaho has a lot of mask-free businesses & towns. SLC is masked to the rim.

The great American experiment doesn’t have many (any?) truly maskless COVID epidemics in large cities save the NE corridor in March/April 2020. For unmitigated control groups, look to rural, right-leaning counties with high rates of church attendance.

My main conclusion is that people and businesses can be trusted to manage themselves.

National messaging focusing on personal responsibility and local adaptation will have greater reach in the US than federal mandates as most don’t trust the federal government.

Early calls for management at higher levels of national & international governance were pushing for mandates from powers most people don’t trust, and these mandates themselves come from a lack of trust in different people in different places.

Trust is everything.

Why mandate lockdowns outside your own home unless you don’t trust folk & businesses to manage their own risk? Why close schools for someone else’s kids unless you don’t trust their parents?

People can be trusted, but in order to know that we have to give them a chance.

Trusting people and focusing management at the level & speed of trust will be crucial for tackling climate change. I’m so optimistic about the world seeing what I’ve seen with COVID - the key to tackling this will be building trust by giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Management actions at levels people don’t trust and moving faster than the speed of trust will produce political pushback and polarize an issue.

Scientists interested in affecting US policy would be wise to take notes and learn how to listen to, trust & value non-scientists.

The best way to do this would be for liberals to learn to trust conservatives managing their own communities, and for conservatives to trust liberals managing cities face different challenges (e.g. guns on the farm vs guns in the subway are very different things).

The brilliance of our system of government is in the 9th and 10th amendments ceding rights and powers unenumerated in the constitution to the people & the states, helping Wyoming do Wyoming and New York to do New York.

We need to be less insistent that all problems be addressed at the federal level or all problems be left to states. This is as ludicrous as insisting we only turn a car left or we only turn a car right

Multilevel management is our greatest strength & it requires multilevel trust

P.S. Harry Potter World was absolutely amazing!!! Thank you @UniversalORL for the immersive experience and thank you @GovRonDeSantis for trusting people and businesses to manage themselves!

P.P.S. This is not to ignore systemic problems in universal favor of personal responsibility (similar to only turning a car right), but rather to better understand the role personal & other responsibility + trust *can* play if/when we chose to utilize it for management ends.