Are We In a Mania?

I’m grateful to a regular commenter for drawing our attention to an article in Quillette by Jonathan Kay. Its initially compelling argument is driven by data provided by the company Moovit who eponymous app provides realtime information on transit much as Waze does for highway traffic. It is used by enough people that I believe it is a reasonable gauge of ridership. You can see Moovit’s data for yourself here.

What the data seem to show is that there have been sharp drop-offs in public transit ridership, the point of inflection in ridership in Seattle was on March 5, and in most other U. S. cities around March 10. These drop-offs precede lockdown order and so are not a consequence of them. Here’s the basic conclusion of the piece:

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this kind of data in recent weeks, and trying to tease out the policy ramifications. One of the trends that’s jumped out is that lockdown orders have tended to ratify public behaviour as much as prescribe or circumscribe it. Seattle residents essentially began imposing a lockdown on themselves before their government did, because the city had become one of the country’s leading early COVID-19 hotspots. Likewise, most Swedes didn’t need their government to tell them to stay home. Like everyone else, they get their news from the globalized data dump and anxiety mill known as social media. They all saw what was happening in Italy and elsewhere.

He also articulates something I’ve been saying here since early on in the crisis:

The skeptics who argue that lockdowns “don’t work” usually will support this claim by ticking off nations or regions that have succeeded in fighting off serious COVID-19 outbreaks without imposing harsh government restrictions. But when you parse the actual data, what you find is that these tend to be high-trust, high-education, high-information societies—such as in Scandinavia and East Asia—where official lockdowns haven’t been necessary precisely because a critical mass of people have effectively locked themselves down on their own.

but gets beyond the data here:

If spring-breakers in Miami were as conscientious and disciplined as, say, most office workers in Stockholm or Tokyo, the state’s governor wouldn’t have had to clear the beaches. But they’re not, so he did. Such spectacles tell us a lot about college students, but not much about lockdowns.

That has been analyzed. College students returning from spring break did not trigger an up-tick in new cases of COVID-19 as you might expect. Clearly, there’s more going on in the spread of the virus than simple proximity. That’s why I’ve kept harping on things like temperature and angle of the sun. As far as we know to date there has been no major outbreak of COVID-19 anywhere south of 23°N and that includes Brazil and the much-publicized Ecuador. Clearly, Ecuador’s health care system was already teetering on the brink and even a small increase in the number of cases requiring urgent care was enough to tip it over the edge. One might claim that you can’t trust the figures being released in Brazil or Ecuador but that cuts both ways. If the statistics from those places are phony, you ignore them rather than assuming the opposite and my claim remains true.

The author goes on to make this prudent observation:

The crowdsourced aspect of lockdowns is bad news and good news. It’s bad news because getting all of society’s actors on the same page will take many months. And so, as state-level data already show, we won’t be able to get our economies up and running on anything like the speedy timeline that most self-styled lockdown opponents are seeking. But it’s also good news, because a slower, crowdsourced form of lockdown lifting will be subject to a whole slew of negative feedback mechanisms among ordinary people and employers, such that localized outbreaks naturally lead to corrections. And so we can avoid the problem, depicted in Ferguson’s graphs, by which sudden quantum shifts in centralized policy yield behavioural spikes whose catastrophic effects set off an endless wave of epidemiological boom and bust.

but arrives at this dour conclusion:

Little of this self-imposed “lockdown-lite” is going to change in coming weeks and months, regardless of what government does, even as the masks come off and the floor dots start to fade. The changes we’ve made are sociologically sticky and, in some cases, literally hard-bolted into our public architecture.

I’m not so sure. I think that lockdown fatigue is starting to set in and, unless there is a significant surge in new cases, people are likely to relax over time.

I see no obvious straight line relationship between lockdowns and declines in COVID-19 cases. If there were, Illinois’s and Chicago’s experiences would be different than they have been. Proclaiming that they have not effective because Chicagoans aren’t compliant enough is just another way of saying that the measures as implemented are not effective. That’s one of the weaknesses of the piece. There were, in fact, precipitating events that prompted the decline in public transit ridership. The mayor of Seattle proclaimed a state of emergency on March 3 and the point of inflection in ridership took place on March 5. That can hardly have been a coincidence. I haven’t researched it but I suspect that Seattle major news outlets were deluged with reports about COVID-19 that moved people to lock themselves down.

Over the centuries cities and towns or even whole societies have found themselves in the grip of mass manias. There is a real disease that has real consequences and has resulted in real deaths.

In the United States half of all of the diagnosed cases and half of all of the deaths appear to have occurred in the New York metropolitan area. Outside the New York area the situation is different. In more than half of the states the prevalence of the disease is around 1 in a thousand and the morbidity is on the order of 1 in a 100,000.

I don’t know what the right policy is and, more importantly, I don’t even know if there is a right policy. I agree with the basic message of the linked article: the people’s behavior will tell us what the policy will be.