There's a paradoxical element to my argument with 'Fred' the 5 a side footballer who is refusing to socially distance, because he thinks this is flu, that is of more general importance.
1. It makes you wonder how many Freds there are. The same questions Ferguson et al had to ask themselves in the Imperial Uni paper when they made assumptions about the change in contacts following social distancing measures.
2. Fred's argument is 'we have to just let these people die, the cost of shutting down the rest of us is too big.' Partly based on him having almost no understanding of how many people would die, partly just willing the number to be lower.
3. He concludes from this that even though we have a collective strategy, based on a different understanding from his, he is going to implement his own private strategy.
4. This involves not socially distancing any more than he's forced to, and actively trying to encourage others to follow suit.
[He is going to gather kids from his son's school to hold impromptu PE lessons. He fits this into a strategy of what he calls 'civil disobedience'.]
6. Recall that one of the concerns about the 'clamp down hard now, test trace and relax social distancing later, get to the vaccine' strategy is 'fatigue' in social distancing, that would cause a second epidemic.
7. Fred gets to the wrong conclusion partly because of bad information, evil moral calculus and an inability to work out the consequences of his actions for the societal equilibrium path of this virus and the economy. [Which, to be fair to him, is hard.]
8. But having got to the wrong place, if we replicate that thought process over a large enough group, he ends up being evidence that the strategy of later relaxed social distancing and test and trace does indeed have big risks for the rest of us.
9. Questions this unpleasant episode lodged in my mind are. How many Freds are there? How many do you need to fuck things up in a large way and get a second epidemic going?
10. Imagine a hyper aware Fred. He could put his argument 'look, the country is full of a lot of selfish, badly informed and frankly callous individuals like me, and the Imperial model is just not accounting for that, so this isn't going to work how they say it will.'
11. A final thing that the incident occurred to me which the Imperial paper does not seem to catch is the following. [And it is another sense in which the hyper aware Fred is right].
12. The modern epidemiological models derive [I am not an epidemiologist myself but] as far as I can tell from the Anderson and May papers from 1979 on. Their apotheosis was the tragically accurate account they predicted of the spread of HIV in the 1980s.
An innovative feature of their model of HIV was incorporating the variance in sexual promiscuity across a population as a key parameter.
Previous models predicted the trajectory based on the average number of partners [like the very simplest models used to do calculations like 1-1/R0, but not like the detailed disaggregated, numerically simulated Imperial monster model].
A population with mostly hardly anyone playing away, with a few people going at it hammer and tongs with anyone, would propagate HIV around much faster than if the surplux sex was shared around more evenly.
Back to the case in hand: as well as wondering on average how much Fredness there is in us all [that's how the Imperial model seems to treat it] I wonder if the variance of Fredness across us isn't also a key factor.
If a large number of are just a little bit lax, but there are a few super-Freds on active 'civil disobedience' campaigns, that strikes me as on the face of it a lot worse, for Anderson and May reasons, than if our carelessness was shared out entirely equally.
13. This time this really is the final point. Another way in which Fred is 'right' is that ultimately even compulsory social distancing happens by something that is like consent.
14. If enough Freds set about civil disobedience because incorrect/evil reasons X and Y, compulsory and voluntary distancing could fail, thus rendering Fred 'right' [not for reasons X and Y of course].
Poli sci people study this all the time - how revolutions happen. 'Consent' is not quite the right word. More 'coordination on the expectation that what the government want to happen won't, based on assessing that everyone else has come to think the same way.'
Where does that leave us: the importance of effective enforcement by the authorities and via shaming of Freds, I guess, so that the pointlessness of the clampdown Fred fears won't come to pass.
