Several of your bullet points read "X goes wrong, until the government steps in". What makes you think the government is able to put out these fires at the same rate as people run into them? The government also just consists of people. Declaring a national emergency, regulating supplies and stores, testing the literal whole county and providing food and healthcare packages takes time, planning and frankly skill that I'm not sure governments have.
That being said, I agree with quite a few of your points. But I think the negative impact of empty grocery stores, people hoarding hygiene products, shops closing because too many employees are staying indoors etc. will be very serious, and that it will take at least weeks before any centralised plan will be able to catch up with this.
Declaring a national emergency, regulating supplies and stores, testing the literal whole county and providing food and healthcare packages takes time, planning and frankly skill that I'm not sure governments have.
Do you mind elaborating on that?
But I think the negative impact of empty grocery stores, people hoarding hygiene products, shops closing because too many employees are staying indoors etc. will be very serious, and that it will take at least weeks before any centralised plan will be able to catch up with this.
Would it be such a bad thing if...
I would add that during a panic people tend not to listen to the government and all its actions to control the crowd are viewed as both harmful and dangerous to the people and, in standard mob mind think, get to "the government is doing this to us" and so really bad things start happening.
Here are a number of points:
"The government" in the US certainly doesn't have the authority to do most of these things.
Both the federal and state governments have vast powers during public health emergencies. For instance, the Supreme Court has made clear that the government can hold you down and vaccinate you against your will. Likewise, the Army (not just National Guard) can be deployed to enforce laws, including curfew and other quarantine laws.
Yes, it's unclear whether government officials would be willing to use these options, and how much the public would...
It's far harder to do contact tracing
Why is that? I'm assuming that panic would mean more isolation and only going out to gather essentials like food and medicine. With that assumption it seems like it'd be easier to do contact tracing.
and reaching out to the community to get them messages about what they should or should not do when people are panicking
If the internet stays up I don't see why there'd be a problem here.
Lots of essential industries like the water company and the electric company need other parts of the economy, lik...
When there are sufficient supplies of things like food, like now, and people start hoarding, shortages become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Would it make sense to encourage the panic to start too soon? First the customers would cause a shortage, then the producers would increase their production in hope for easy profit, then the shortage would end with everyone having enough stuff at home... and then the actual need would come.
More simply, if people are going to empty the shops eventually, I prefer if they do it one month before the actual crisis rather than one week before it. Because during one month, the market may fix the shortage, but one week is not enough time to do much.
Increasing perceptions of danger could lead people to refuse to take care of people they otherwise would have provided care for. This is undoubtably bad for the person who would have received care; whether it's good or bad for society as a whole depends on the specifics of transmission and care.
Because people who think and act deliberately are less likely to blindly and actively hurt others than those who are acting on a fight/flight/freeze instinct. We are not evolutionarily equipped to handle threats of a nature such that:
Panic is what we call it when the elephant has gotten really freaked out and the rider stops trying to determine the best course of action in the face of what feels like an uncontrollable primitive mind. Panicky people tend to do stupid things like breaking quarantine, other-seeking for comfort, finding out those people are all panicking too and starting a riot instead of appropriate behaviors like staying inside whenever possible, making phone calls to authorities to report the riot outside, and washing their damn hands (and maybe sanitizing the phone as well).
I think it's axiomatically better if people do stuff on purpose instead of acting out of animal fear. I'd even think this if people were choosing to do the wrong stuff due to, let's say... inconsistent and unreliable messaging or something, because at least they're thinking and acting deliberately which makes them less likely to do the stupid panicky animal things that confer no benefit but add needless harm to the problem.
running away is just going to result in the formation of dangerous migrating packs of sick monkeys spreading the problem around and looking for something with a face to punch
Wouldn't people here be afraid of getting infected and just want to stay home? If the army was deployed, would this still be a risk?
By analogy: most of the deaths from the Spanish flu are believed to have been caused by over-reacting immune systems. Our global response to disease has the potential to cause more damage than the disease itself.
That is not necessarily what is happening -- but it is a scenario we should be aware of.
are believed to have been caused by over-reacting immune systems
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Most who died from the Spanish flu, actually had a literal allergic reaction to the Spanish flu? That people died from the medical treatment meant to combat the flu?
The main way in which panic causes damage during outbreaks is from people breaking quarantine to flee affected areas, and bringing the disease with them. This may be a problem later, when more areas have travel restrictions, but it isn't a problem if it happens right now. So I expect that early panic is better than late panic.
I sure don't want the people who are supposed to be balancing the electrical grid to panic and stay home to keep themselves and their families safe. Or the police, or the government employees in charge of coordinating everything, or the waste treatment plant workers, etc.
I don't want people to have the emotion of "panic" when they're told to isolate themselves to protect the community. The logic of panic is: "Who cares about "the community", I'm doing what's best for myself!"
That certainly makes sense when it comes to core infrastructure, but it's not clear to me that core infrastructure would actually be compromised.
With panic I'd think the government would be able to get a ton of funding to fight this. Perhaps that can be used to pay workers in core infrastructure 2x their normal wages. Would they still stay home? More than 75% of them? What if it were 3x their normal wages? Are there no other incentives that would work?
Along the same lines, it seems that some of the panic causes declaration of national emergency and placing restrictions on various normal activities is not the full story.
I think, and a lot depends on the how it is done and perhaps when, declaring national emergencies can help to limit panic, provide a structure where most see they have a coordinating rule in place so end up trusting that others will act as they will (e.g., we get an equal share of the scarce resources and not some asymmetric distribution unrelated to a utility type allocation).
I think this might also have some implications for the claims about how the west could not possibly be successful in limiting the spread like China, Singapore or Taiwan have done. The West will simply do that in a different manner. It is not clear to me that only one way to accomplishing the same goal is possible (gross as the metaphor is cats do get skinned many different ways).
Why wouldn't the west be successful in that sort of socialist role? Would citizens resist? With physical violence?
What I was suggesting is that the western democracies do not have to use the same tool set as more authoritarian government seem to have used. Quarantines may well be imposed (on significant geographic areas) but might not need to issue commands for related supplies like waste disposal or resource deliveries. They can (and a lot more easily based on above comments than most seem to think, in terms of just pure governmental powers) but that might not be needed or even the most efficient way for western societies to do so.
Could people resist or resort to violence to resist such policies? Maybe but that will depend on a number of factors, including what what might be called something of a path effect -- the war could have been avoided but some early actions lead to a situation neither side could back out of so war ended up being the path of least resistance.
It seems like it's mostly being taken as a given that we want to avoid panic. I'm sure avoiding panic is in fact desirable, but I don't quite understand why that's the case, so please interpret this post and my follow up comments as Socratic grilling.
If there was panic, here is what I would expect:
Here is what I suspect might be wrong with that story I just told: