James Fallows has a very good article in the Atlantic, documenting the many failures in the US government response to the Covid-19 epidemic. While I don’t contest his specific points, some of which document appalling lapses in intelligence gathering and processing, I do not accept his framing of the problem. The failure here went well beyond government incompetence—there was a major failure of imagination.
Here’s Fallows:
By the middle of March, Trump had switched to blasting the “Chinese virus,” which he continued doing through much of the month. On March 11, he gave a poorly received national address from the Oval Office, in which he bungled the announcement of an upcoming ban on most (or maybe all; it wasn’t clear) air travel to the U.S. from Europe. Several people who have dealt with past disease outbreaks told me that, in a normal administration, one option for mid-January would have been a temporary, but total, ban on all inbound international flights to the United States. “A serious option in all contingency planning would be total closure of the airspace,” a former senior official with experience in pandemic response told me. “We learned from the bird flu that as long as the airspace was open, we were completely vulnerable as a population. It is a draconian approach that could strand thousands of people. But as we look back—when taking early intelligence into serious consideration from the start—this one option would be an early choice for the president to make. It would be followed immediately by humanitarian support, and then transitioned through hubs to permit a measured flow of people to key locations. Follow-on screening would also take place prior to any further travel.”
Hindsight is 20-20. It’s very unlikely that a “normal administration” would have imposed a travel ban in mid-January. The first European travel ban was January 31st, the same day as the US ban. Fallows underestimates just how deep the failure of imagination actually was.
On January 23rd, 2020, I knew that Covid-19 was a major problem. I knew that it was transmittable between humans. I knew that some experts suggested that it could become a worldwide pandemic. I knew that the Chinese government was so concerned that they took the unprecedented step of locking down an entire province of 60 million people. The US government also knew this. The Canadian and European governments knew this. The media knew this. The Democrats knew this. The Taiwanese knew this.
Unfortunately, all of those groups (except the Taiwanese) didn’t take the threat seriously. We didn’t even ban flights from China until January 31st, and some people even opposed that ban. A ban on flights from Europe did not occur until mid-March, by which time large numbers of infected people had flown from Europe to the East Coast.
In my view, this was a failure of imagination. My initial view was that “this is another SARS”. I’m pretty sure that most other people felt the same way at the time—despite having all the relevant facts that we have today. Only when it began to spread widely in the West did we start taking it seriously, but by that time it was too late to stop.
So yes, in retrospect a total ban on all inbound flights in mid-January would have been ideal. That might have allowed the US to achieve a much lower death total (albeit only with effective follow-up steps). But there was almost no support for such a move at the time because Westerners were unable to imagine how bad it would get. We had the facts (by January 23rd at the latest, but actually earlier); we simply refused to believe the doomsday predictions that were being made by a few epidemiologists.
There is no bureaucratic fix for a failure of imagination, just as there is no bureaucratic fix for the failures of imagination that led to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. All we can do is learn from our mistakes.
The next 10 times this occurs we’ll almost certainly overreact, just as we overreacted to later 9/11 and Pearl Harbor type threats. Most of those next 10 virus outbreaks will be less severe—more like the first SARS epidemic than the Covid-19 epidemic. But having seen what happened in 2020, we’ll react more like Taiwan did this time, if not even more vigorously.
That’s just how the world works (horse, barn door). People don’t have enough imagination to take steps to prevent disasters until they’ve seen the effects of a disaster. After our electrical system gets knocked out for months by a huge solar flare, then we’ll start stocking up on some extra transformers. We’ll have arms control after the next accidental nuclear war. It’s not that we don’t understand the risks at an intellectual level, it’s that we can’t really imagine the worst-case outcome.
HT: David Beckworth, Matt Yglesias
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Jul 6 2020 at 7:16pm
Scott – it goes way beyond what Jim Fallows wrote in his article. The failures were manifest through out and there were high ups in the government that knew what was going on. there is absolutely nobody involved that will emerge with their reputations intact and this includes individuals who have all but been championed as tellers of the truth.
Ask yourself why all the important clinical trial data is coming out of the UK and some other European countries and not the US. It is just awful to see this crumble before my eyes.
Scott Sumner
Jul 6 2020 at 8:46pm
Yes, lots of mistakes were made.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 7 2020 at 10:41am
Lack of imagination is a pervasive problem. Lots of ordinary accidents happen because somebody could not imagine what could possibly happen if he did X or did not do X, thereby underestimating expected costs. Since the accidents caused by politicians and bureaucrats are mostly paid by somebody else (and sometimes benefit them), they have even less incentive to make imagination efforts.
Thomas Hutcheson
Jul 7 2020 at 11:00am
Agreed that a failure of imagination was an important factor, but that was not the reason we did not have/could not develop a robust TTI regime, including random testing of asymptomatic people. It does not explain the active resistance to wearing masks. It does not explain “lockdowns” rather than rather than regulating the use of public spaces. It does not explain an unemployment insurance system that does not replace a high percentage of lost wages plus the costs of health insurance or the lack of paid sick leave to encourage infectious people from going to work. It does not explain the Fed’s failure to maintain expectations of steady NGDP growth.
And for the other risks you mention, solar flares, nuclear exchanges, asteroids, CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere I wonder if the problem is the inability to imagine the consequences or the failure to systemically apply cost benefit analysis to public investment decisions, possibly because this would entail higher expenditures and taxes.
Brian Donohue
Jul 7 2020 at 12:06pm
“On January 23rd, 2020, I knew that Covid-19 was a major problem.”
But on February 7th, over at The Money Illusion, you wrote:
“PS. Don’t eat at P.F. Chang, you might catch coronavirus from one of the Mexicans who work there. After all, one out of every 40 million Americans have the virus, and if you are young and healthy you have maybe a 1/1000 chance of dying if you do catch the virus. That 1 in 40 billion risk is simply unacceptable!”
The markets didn’t buy in until mid-February.
Scott Sumner
Jul 7 2020 at 1:24pm
Brian, I meant that I knew it was a major problem in places where it was widespread, such as China. I knew that it might become a major problem in the US. That comment referred to the fact that at the time there were only a few cases in the US, and hence (I thought) no need to excessive fear. So there is no inconsistency.
As I said in the post, I shared in the failure of imagination. I failed to anticipate 100,000 deaths in the US, despite knowing the facts of the matter (highly contagious and deadly in China.)
E. Harding
Jul 7 2020 at 2:56pm
“That comment referred to the fact that at the time there were only a few cases in the US, and hence (I thought) no need to excessive fear.”
But there weren’t. There were already thousands of cases in the U.S., and the U.S. government was doing nothing to contain them.
Brian Donohue
Jul 7 2020 at 4:32pm
Fair enough. Your point that it didn’t matter what China said or who the US President was is a good one. In no universe was America gonna do anything before March.
TMC
Jul 7 2020 at 12:22pm
Not much to quibble about here. My guess is that we won’t have that much over reaction in the future though. Our poor response to Ebola has been forgotten, and likely we’ll forget about the mistakes of this crisis as well. Humans have a way of putting failures of the past behind themselves.
Philo
Jul 7 2020 at 2:22pm
I don’t think “failure of imagination” is the right diagnosis. It was always easy to *imagine* scenarios much worse even than what has actually happened; novelists and filmmakers have fleshed out many such disasters. Unfortunately, most people, including most of the politically important people, considered the probability of developments as bad as what have ensued to be quite low.
And were they wrong? How likely was it that the outbreak in Wuhan was going to lead to the worst world-wide epidemic in a century? That’s what happened, but—relying on just what was known to most political leaders in mid-January, excluding hindsight—how likely was it?
Criticism of politicians based on hindsight is unfair.
You are right to expect a more vigorous response to the next sign that an epidemic may be in the offing, because the present epidemic quite properly affects people’s probability estimates. After the next threat has passed, in hindsight the vigorous response may well be seen to have been an over-reaction to what would have been only a mild outbreak. But, again, hindsight criticism of the response would be unfair.
E. Harding
Jul 7 2020 at 8:29pm
” That’s what happened, but—relying on just what was known to most political leaders in mid-January, excluding hindsight—how likely was it?”
If a country consistently had a worse response than, say, Uganda or Burma, very. It was a rapidly spreading respiratory virus that was clogging up hospitals in Wuhan by mid-January. We all knew how fast and how widely the H1N1 flu spread. If a country had a response as good as Uganda or Burma, it would have done fine.
“Criticism of politicians based on hindsight is unfair.”
Incorrect. It is absolutely necessary. They did nothing to protect the public.
The much more likely response from Western democracies is consistent under-reaction, never over-reaction.
E. Harding
Jul 7 2020 at 2:54pm
There was no “failure of imagination”. Everybody who was in power in 2020 remembered the H1N1 flu in 2009 -how the first time it was noticed, it was already in numerous places at once and had been spreading for quite some time before then and how extensively it spread throughout the population after its discovery. World leaders should have taken its lessons to heart, and have sighed and wiped the sweat off their brows that it was a nothingburger.
The pandemic was a failure of Western-style democracy. Western-style democracy and fake Western “experts” have both been permanently discredited from this pandemic. The United States and Europe both killed hundreds of thousands of their own innocent civilians for no reason. China never did anything of the kind since the Great Leap Forward. India is having a massive pandemic, increasing faster than in Pakistan and Bangladesh. These democracies’ leaderships cannot criticize China, Burma, Vietnam, Uganda, Hungary, or Thailand for anything right now. These countries don’t kill hundreds of thousands of their own innocent civilians for no reason. Maybe Australia, the Baltics, Ireland, and New Zealand still can criticize these countries. But certainly not to credit the general Western democratic model over that of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Back in January, I, for one, expected almost every major first-world democracy to have a South Korea-type response, because that was what seemed logical to me at the time. I was astonished to discover that Western-style fake “experts” and Western-style fake “democracy” were entirely rotten to their core, completely useless except for killing people.
Russia’s failure is a lot less excusable than that of the West since it had a decent testing infrastructure before it had major community spread. And yet, it didn’t actually bother to ban travel from Europe, trace contacts and isolate the infected. But that Putin would be discredited was not too surprising, given the Russian people’s traditional carelessness and Putin’s general lack of intense, focused personal intervention in fixing Russia’s many problems. What the current crisis shows isn’t that every example of alternatives to Western-style democracy succeeds. It does show that once you’ve picked the Western democratic model, you are really playing Russian roulette with the lives of your own people.
“The next 10 times this occurs we’ll almost certainly overreact, just as we overreacted to later 9/11 and Pearl Harbor type threats. ”
Not a chance. They’ll underreact every time.
Mark Z
Jul 7 2020 at 10:38pm
How much of this is just people being Bayesians? If an event has thus far been extremely rare, it makes sense have a very low prior on that event happening prospectively. There may be specific reasons why it will happen this time that should override one’s prior, but most people may not understand enough to tell whether those arguments are convincing, so they have to base their judgment on what seem like similar past experiences. If people in general had more vivid imaginations, I’m not sure it would work out much better. Perhaps we’d be better prepared for events like this, but we might also waste a lot of resources and time preparing for the countless disasters one can imagine happening but never actually will. Higher sensitivity, but lower specificity.
E. Harding
Jul 7 2020 at 11:40pm
“How much of this is just people being Bayesians”
None.
“If an event has thus far been extremely rare”
It hasn’t been. Numerous flu strains have spread around the world and infected millions.
This didn’t even require any imagination. Everyone saw what happened in Wuhan; everyone knows flu/pneumonia is contagious and can be spread by the slightest cough.
“but we might also waste a lot of resources and time preparing for the countless disasters one can imagine happening but never actually will”
Something tells me Uganda, Burma, and Tunisia were no more inherently “prepared” than Britain, France, and Belgium.
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