Thread by @t0nyyates

Brilliant letter. Since the optimal policy response to a pandemic is also an economic policy, and not just a health policy, I hope that there might be a consensus forged across both epidemiology and economics too. I for one concur with the prescription in this text.

https://twitter.com/BillHanage/status/1316508462361214977

Really, the matter also draws in political scientists. Because both the prescribed poilcy and the do-nothing counterfactual entail novel and dramatic political-economic forces.

The do-nothing policy envisages a hefty multiple of the circa 60k deaths we have seen; we talk often about how the financial crisis scarred attitudes towards the status quo - how would 200k deaths leave its imprint on politics and civil society?

The do-something policy involves many tricky trade-offs, between groups, over time. It is possible to overdo lockdown policies [perpetual lockdown would stop the virus, but starve us too] so there are health/econ trade-offs around the optimum.

The dynamics of the virus/ economy will be greatly affected by behaviour, and therefore by the consent, or lack of it, to whatever policy is chosen. The best thing to do depends partly on the feasibility of fashioning consent over the choices available, or proceeding without it.

A virus amongst other animals is mostly a scientific matter; a virus amongst ourselves is not just a scientific matter, but as much a social scientific one; and a consensus about the best way to respond to it knits together all of this expertise.

Given the uncertainties in the epi-econ questions, reasonable disagreements possible about how to resolve some of the trade-offs, it's unlikely there would be consensus about the fine details [how much of a lockdown, for how long initially, locking down what exactly?].

[..followed by what kind of temporary measures when later outbreaks happen?...] But the overall strategy - of suppress... transit to test trace isolate... wait for lowering of mortality rates/spread as knowledge/therapies/vaccines arrive - would be agreed on by many, if not most.