What We Should Learn from the Pandemic

There are many lessons, but so far, Western countries show no signs of learning them.

Dear readers,

Yesterday brought the news that the U.S. Department of Energy has concluded (with low confidence but still) that the infamous and vilified ‘lab leak’ theory is in fact the most likely origin of Covid-19. This brought Covid-19 back into the news for the first time in what feels like a long time. I think now is as good a time as ever to revisit the pandemic and talk about the lessons we can - and must - learn from it.

As soon as the invasion of Ukraine began, media quickly lost interest in the virus that had dominated the news for two years at that point. Despite how tired we may all be of hearing about Covid-19 at this point, it is never the less crucial that this part of contemporary history not be forgotten, and that the policy decisions and interventions during the pandemic be critically analyzed. This should be done not to cast blame on any individual policy-maker, but to avoid repeating mistakes. Hardly anyone can fail to empathize with the difficulty policy-makers faced, in particular early in the pandemic, when decisions had to be made quickly with very few facts on the table.

Rather, the reason why we need to revisit these policy decisions is so as to avoid repeating the mistakes that were made. Pandemics will, by all accounts, become a far more common occurrence in the future than they have been in the past. While Covid-19 may be over, the threat from new viruses is not.

First, I would argue that one of the more important lessons to learn from this pandemic, is the one regarding willpower, and how policy-makers need to treat it as a limited resource. Hence, before we move on from the pandemic, let’s revisit how restrictions should be evaluated.

When evaluating lockdowns and restrictions aimed at reducing the spread of Covid-19, focus has often been on the economic impact relative to the reduction of spread – a typical cost-benefit analysis, in other words. Shutting down non-essential stores is very costly for the economy (and, in the end, for state and federal budgets), but does reduce spread quite a bit. Mandating masks is not very expensive, and also does reduce spread (if perhaps not by as much as initially thought). Banning non-essential travel is somewhere in between, economically speaking, as some parts of the country are hit far worse than others (mainly regions that depend on tourism), but again it does reduce spread at least somewhat.

One can keep going and plot every measure according to cost and efficacy along an XY-axis.

This cost-benefit analysis, however, completely ignores willpower. Whether or not willpower truly is a limited resource, like a muscle that can get tired, is hotly debated among behavioral scientists, but suffice to say willpower acts like a limited resource in many ways, and the failure to account for limited willpower explains a lot of the well-documented pandemic fatigue.

How then, would we rank different restrictions in terms of willpower expenditure? With the obvious caveat that this may very depending on individuals, restrictions on outside activities are extremely high cost in terms of willpower, but with limited efficacy. Viruses in general do not spread very well outdoors. Restricting people’s ability to gather outdoors meant human contact was more or less outlawed, as indoor gatherings were already restricted. It is absolutely crucial to note that virtually all pandemic restrictions depended on the consent of those whose lives were being restricted. There was never any way for the state, even with the help of a million Karens, to enforce the restrictions on an un-cooperating population.

In order to ensure that a necessary level of co-operation in the long term, policy-makers must take willpower into account. If you push people over the limit, they will disobey out of sheer desperation, or act out in other destructive ways, such as by drinking more in order to cope. If you do not provide a lawful way to gain human contact – a basic human need – people are more likely to completely disregard the rule and meet indoors where there is less chance of being caught (which is undesirable given the much higher risk of contagion when indoors). Not allowing outdoor gatherings may have been relatively “cheap”, economically speaking. In terms of willpower it was however incredibly expensive, and certainly not worth it given the very small benefit it provided.

Another example where economic and mental cost differ would be school closures. Closing schools is not free, financially speaking, but it was also not extremely expensive in the short term in a world where most people were already either furloughed or working from home. Emphasis being on the short term: I and many others fear that we are likely to end up paying dearly for school closures for decades to come as productivity is permanently reduced. Even in the short term though, the mental cost that this policy caused parents was severe, and never truly accounted for.

The obvious counterargument is that these measures were taken out of an abundance of caution. We didn’t know whether the virus could spread outdoors to any serious extent, so we assumed that it did. But imagine that the government treated every crisis this way. Under this logic, every terrorist attack should cause a total nationwide lockdown under the culprits are caught, since there is no way of saying whether they will strike again and where. To take away liberties because you merely suspect that they may be dangerous is not acceptable.

In a free society, you cannot take away rights first and ask questions later.

The correct way to go about pandemic restrictions would have been to start by imposing those that had a low psychological cost, and then if that proved insufficient, move on to more “costly” measures.

The second thing we ought to learn from the pandemic is the value of transparency and real, measurable policy goals. Any violation in rights needs to be accompanied by a specific criteria that, when fulfilled, will lead to that right being restored. It may seem a distant memory, but it was not that long ago that politicians were talking about “15 days to flatten the curve”. Instead, from the very beginning politicians should have defined a certain level of acceptable spread. Since Covid-19 was never going to go away completely, it was only a matter of time before such a threshold needed to be defined.

Above that threshold, certain restrictions would be imposed. At another, higher threshold, more severe restrictions would be imposed. Any time a certain measure was proven to be ineffective, it should have immediately ceased (the best example is deep cleaning, which does nothing to reduce spread). Whether this threshold should have been defined in case numbers, deaths, hospital bed occupancy or some kind of weighted average can be debated, but the point is that politicians from day one should have made clear under what circumstances they would give their citizens their rights back. When lockdowns were instead indefinitely extended in many places, with no clear justification rather than the old “we need to flatten the curve” slogan, people began to suspect that politicians had no plans of ever giving them their old pre-pandemic lives back.

Another thing that contributed to that sentiment was the fact that politicians and experts spent the first few months after the first Covid-19 outbreak blatantly lying about the efficacy of masks. It is often said that the first casualty of war is the truth, and this was definitely the case in the war against the pandemic. The CDC warned that masks did not work. The World Health Organization agreed. The surgeon general himself joined the chorus. As we now know, the reason for this charade was to prevent a run on masks that could have meant not enough masks being available for health care workers.

If experts and policy-makers had been honest about masking, the free market on its own would have almost certainly been able to turn around and produced the necessary number of masks. That’s the great thing about a free market: Shortages are short-lived. If the authorities were unwilling to trust the invisible hand, the defense production act could have been invoked which would have forced manufacturers to switch over to producing masks, similar to what happened in Taiwan (a country with 98.8 percent fewer Covid-19 deaths than the US per capita). Either option would have been better than lying.

Of course, in another cruel twist, it appears that once policy-makers decided to recommend masking, they may have gone too far in the other direction and exaggerated its benefits.

The lab leak theory is yet another example of lack of transparency. The truth is, in March 2020, no-one knew for sure where the virus came from. Rather than encouraging a vigorous and open debate, anyone questioning whether the lab in Wuhan that had studied coronaviruses for years might have something to do with it was branded a conspiracy theorist. I suspect that this was due to the West wanting to keeping good relations with China, but to me, this suppressing made the least sense. Convincing Donald Trump’s supporters to take protective measures would probably have been easier if the government had confirmed that the virus might well have been caused by shady Chinese research.

Third and finally, we ought to have learned by now that no crisis should be treated as an opportunity. Contrary to Rahm Emanuel’s famous saying about never letting a crisis go to waste, that is exactly what policy-makers should be doing: Focus on fixing the crisis, go back to status quo, and then, once everything is back to normal, go back to pushing policy proposals. When politicians use a crisis to push policies that they could never have implemented without the crisis, resentment is bound to build. And when politicians elected on a narrow mandate of returning the country to status quo instead try to push for ambitious reforms, there is going to be backlash, as Joe Biden has found out.

What’s worse, the “never let a crisis go to waste” mentality has provided perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theorists. If politicians are seen as using every crisis to pass otherwise unpopular policies into law while the voters are distracted, more and more people will start asking themselves whether perhaps the politicians are actually manufacturing crises in order to pass legislation that otherwise would never stand a chance. Hence why conspiracy theories like “Plandemic” gain popularity. Long before the pandemic, some on the left concluded that George W Bush was behind 9/11, based on how the attack allowed his administration to pass the Patriot act. They were wrong then, just like the “Plandemic” conspiracy theorists are wrong now. Never the less, as long as those in power use crises to advance their agenda, these types of conspiracy theories will continue to grow in popularity.

To reiterate, it would be unfair to expect a perfect response to a worldwide crisis like a pandemic. It is however perfectly reasonable to expect policy-makers to learn from their mistakes, and to take steps to ensure that the next crisis is handled better, and with a greater degree of respect for psychology, civil rights, and finally and most importantly, for democracy itself.

Thank you for reading. If you liked this post, please share it, and if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing.

John Gustavsson, PhD