Thoughts on the ongoing COVID-19 quarantine

The default “stop all interaction” is going to turn out to be possibly only the second-worst choice that we can take as a nation, with the worst being doing nothing at all. Its becoming apparent that the public doesn’t understand the distinction between “social distancing” and “quarantining.” This makes sense because those making policy decisions haven’t really put out good definitions themselves, leaving it to the media and individuals to define it for themselves.

Strong leadership would have planned for an outbreak like this years ago and, when COVID-19 came around, simply put the plan into action. Even better, policy makers could have distributed “fire drill”-style exercises that businesses or even entire cities could practice periodically. As it is now we’re simply letting policy be driven by well-meaning but policy- and economics-illiterate epidemiologists and physicians.

There are two factors to be optimized simultaneously. One is to flatten the curve 1, which has received a lot of policy attention through social distancing and quarantine guidance from companies, cities, and the country as a whole. The other equally important element is to minimize the economic and societal impact, which has received much less policy attention. The only real example I’ve seen so far is to distribute $2k to every citizen 2, which is a pretty weak policy. Sure, Joe McCitizen can pay his mortgage this month, but he’s still laid off. It also doesn’t help businesses that are suffering or even going bankrupt because of the social distancing policies. Even worse, this is ridiculously expensive. This one policy move would be the sixth-largest category in the entire 2019 budget 3. If this single policy move were to fund an agency, it would be the sixth largest agency in the govt (same link).

I don’t have a great answer to any of this, but I sure do hope that policy makers think carefully before implementing some pretty insanely extreme policies.