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Friday, 5 February 2021

Loose or Tight

Contrary to what you might think, the relative effectiveness of countries in handling the pandemic has little to do with government competence, political ideology or even geography (let alone their supposed preparedness). According to the social pyschologist Michele Gelfand, "It turns out Covid’s deadliness depends on something simpler and more profound: cultural differences in our willingness to follow rules." She's been pushing this dubious line since the publication of her 2018 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. To date she has managed three Guardian puff-pieces. The first claimed that the Brexit vote and election of Trump could be attributed to a "tight culture" feeling under threat, the second that authoritarian leaders like Trump thrive on fear, while her latest claims that the high Covid-19 death-rate in the US is due to its loose culture and "rule-breaking spirit". She's careful not to claim that one type is superior to the other - America's "maverick spirit" also makes it more creative and innovative - but she's happy to talk of "tight nations" and "loose nations", despite the obvious inconsistency in her reading of the US and UK. 

Gelfand's position - indeed much of the discipline of social pyschology (as opposed to actual sociology) - is premised on stereotypes, both in the sense that the citizens of a particular nation tend to share some fundamental dispositions and that nations are distinct enough to be grouped. That this grouping invariably reduces to a simple dichotomy shows its commonality with theories of society that divide us into two antagonistic camps, from Jonathan Haidt's belief that liberal and conservative temperaments are hardwired rather than socially-determined, to David Goodhart's attempt to explain Brexit through the cultural differences of "somewheres and anywheres". As Gelfand put it in her first puff-piece: "My research across hundreds of communities suggests that the fundamental driver of difference is not ideological, financial or geographical – it’s cultural." While she isn't as overt as Haidt or Goodhart in privileging the conservative worldview, her "fundamental driver of difference" excludes any socioeconomic explanation. 

The Marxist perspective on sociology has long been criticised for reducing social phenomena to the binary of class, but this does at least have an objective reality: you either rely on your capital or your labour (or in a few cases both - homoploutia). The problem with Gelfand's approach is that it lends itself to an abstraction of social behaviour that ignores variation within society, i.e. not only normative differences between class fractions (e.g. middle class versus working class values) but eccentricity and sub-cultures. It also rules out the possibility that adherence to societal norms may exist on a spectrum, rather than being polarised into tight and loose. Consider the following: "All cultures have social norms, or unwritten rules for social behaviour. We adhere to standards of dress, discipline our kids, and don’t elbow our way through crowded subways not because these are legislative codes but because they help our society function. Psychologists have shown that some cultures abide by social norms quite strictly; they’re tight. Others are loose – with a more relaxed attitude toward rule-breakers." 


These are odd examples to pick. Standards of dress have dramatically relaxed in most Western and Asian societies over the last century. Does this mean that the world as a whole has become "looser", or is it down to increased living standards and commodity fashion? Perhaps it's also evidence that the boundary of the domain of norms changes over time. How many pedestrians today would stop walking and face the road to show respect if they saw a hearse go by, let alone doff their hat. But what has changed here: the norm or the fashion for headwear? Or did both change independent of each other? How we discipline our kids has long been a bone of social and political dispute, rather than an agreed norm, and is currently being legislated for in the UK. The reason why we don't barge through crowded subways is that it is counter-productive in a confined space and possibly dangerous. This is a norm, in the sense of a shared standard of behaviour, but it reflects rational calculation and environmental constraints rather than some intrinsic characteristic. 

It is for this reason that platform etiquette and how we behave on trains tends to be common across nations, or more accurately across those metropolitan light rail systems where over-crowding is routine. Breaches of etiquette, e.g. school trippers forming obstructive clumps near the platform entrance or people eating food in a packed carriage, tend to reflect differences in values and behaviours within society more than between nations (the self-absorption of teenagers, how over-work compresses eating and commuting etc). Ironically, the most obvious norm breaking you see on such systems is the behaviour of people who visit the big city only occasionally from elsewhere in the country: the old farmer who offers up his seat to the young female professional to her mild irritation, or the boisterous sports fan who loudly complains that nobody talks to each when they're just trying to block out his tedious singing. If you live in London and visit Tokyo or New York, you'll feel right at home on the subway. If you live in a former pit village in Wales and visit London for the first time, you won't. 

Many social norms are in fact specific to subsets of the nation, and those subsets are largely determined by age, geography and socioeconomic class. This makes obvious sense in that norms arise from the observation of the behaviours of others at key points in our development: they're fundamentally local and generational. The norms we are meant to share as a nation and across all age-groups are often either banal (i.e. we discover other nations share them too, such as saying please and thankyou or avoiding cannibalism) or myths embedded in an often nostalgic media narrative (e.g. the British love of an orderly queue, which was largely a learnt behaviour of the 1940s). In reality, we are all selective about which norms we observe, and the choices we make are often contingent. For example, as David Graeber pointed out in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, whether we return the favour when someone buys us lunch or a drink depends on how inferior or superior we feel to them. Norms not only change over time - new ones arise, old ones mutate or disappear - but they are socially dynamic.


In trying to provide a solid foundation for her claim, Gelfand appeals to both tradition and science: "This distinction, first noticed by Herodotus, is in modern times capable of being quantified by psychologists and anthropologists." In fact Herodotus makes no such distinction between tight and loose cultures, or anything remotely similar. His only collective distinction is between Greek and non-Greek speakers (barbaroi). He certainly compares nations in The Histories, such as the Egyptians and Scythians, but the purpose is to highlight variety not commonality. Herodotus is known both as the father of history and the father of lies, but the latter epithet isn't simply a critique of his honesty or credulity. It means he is the first writer to deal in what today we would call national stereotypes. Gelfand's second claim, that her distinction is quantifiable, is neither here nor there. Not everything that is measurable is meaningful. She needs to explain the mechanism: how social attitudes to rule-breaking have governed the pandemic response.

Her attempt to do so is little more than correlation: "Relative to the US, the UK, Israel, Spain and Italy, countries like Singapore, Japan, China and Austria have been shown to be much tighter. These differences aren’t random. Research in both nation-states and small-scale societies has shown that communities with histories of chronic threat – whether natural disasters, infectious diseases, famines or invasions – develop stricter rules that ensure order and cohesion. It makes good evolutionary sense: following rules helps us survive chaos and crisis. On the flipside, looser groups that have faced fewer threats can afford to be more permissive." This is obviously selective, hence the omission of the nominally "loose" but successful New Zealand. Then there's the claim that Israel isn't a "tight" society despite its conscription, bunkers and military occupation of the West Bank, not to mention the role that "chronic threat" plays in its national identity. The US is famously founded on a story of chronic threat - the slowly expanding frontier of the "Wild West" - but instead of leading to stricter rules to ensure order and cohesion it led to Civil War and loose gun control.

Though published by a liberal newspaper, Gelfand's theory is essentially conservative. It claims that the governments of "loose" countries were slow to act and unwilling to be frank about the dangers of the virus because they feared this would be difficult to sell to their "risk-taking", obstreperous populations (Plato's ship of fools). It also accentuates national stereotypes and so feeds into the growing chauvinist narrative around pandemic management and vaccination. The one suggests that the government was constrained, so it's essentially the fault of the people; the other that the success of Far Eastern countries reflects a more repressive and communal society, so we should be prepared to accept a higher death-toll as the price of our individual liberties. The more mundane truth is that the countries that have done best either already had a relatively well-funded public health infrastructure that had been tested in previous epidemics (not only in Asia but in parts of Africa too), or they took the decison to implement strict measures early in 2020 as a precaution. In other words, it was down to planning and experience or pre-emption. Both of these ultimately reflect political decisions, not broader cultural norms.

17 comments:

  1. "Gelfand's theory is essentially conservative. It claims that the governments of "loose" countries were slow to act and unwilling to be frank about the dangers of the virus because they feared this would be difficult to sell to their "risk-taking", obstreperous populations."

    Governments taking this attitude are just evading responsibility by blaming society. If there is a problem at a society level, it is because governments have promoted individualstic, neo-liberal trends in society and have evaded their responsibility to prepare for situations where collective action is required across society which governments need to coordinate.

    A society that is unable to take collective action in the face of a threat like a pandemic
    is not "freedom-loving". It is a low-trust society. It is so fixated on capital-accumulation that it cannot deal with real existential threats. Jefremy Hunt flunked Exercise Cygnus, and Boris Johnson went to the Cheltenham Festival, because they have difficulty in conceiving what the role of government should be in those circumstances. Johnson wants to be Churchillian while forgetting that Churchill was head of a government that took responsibility for coordinating much of what society was doing in the face of an existential threat.

    Guano

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    1. Isn't one key reason why Europe did so much worse than Asia the fact that northern Italy was a tourism hotspot, while Wuhan was an industrial city unattractive to tourists?

      Italy failed the entire Western world.

      Delete
    2. «reason why Europe did so much worse than Asia the fact that northern Italy was a tourism hotspot, while Wuhan was an industrial city unattractive to tourists?»

      No to both: northern Italy was a hotspot because many local employers are small-medium privately owned businesses, and the owners through a combination of selfish greed and fear of imports from China forced their workers to come to work or be fired. Factories (especially those around a place called Bergamo) became huge virus distribution centres. At one point the italian government put up army roadblocks with automatic guns (probably without magazines) to keep hotspots locked in:

      https://www.google.com/search?q=italy+army+roadblocks+covid&num=50&tbm=isch

      Similar issues happened in other places: in northern Germany the vast majority of the 1,500 workers in a meat packing plant tested positive recently and the police put up high fences around it and the area where most workers lived to lock them in.

      Wuhan is one of the most important chinese cities, and was also a big industrial centre, and extensive links to other big chinese cities and intercontinental links to importing countries etc.; the chinese government accordingly adopted a very ferocious lock-down policy for Wuhan, with no velvet or white gloves. Hong Kong which is similar is looking to do the same:

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/03/ambush-lockdowns-hong-kong-tries-radical-covid-testing-strategy
      «'Ambush' lockdowns: Hong Kong tries radical Covid testing strategy Authorities take to sealing off residential blocks without warning and can break into homes if people do not submit to testing»

      Delete
    3. «A society that is unable to take collective action in the face of a threat like a pandemic is not "freedom-loving".»

      Ronald Reagan: «The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'»

      That the dangers of the propaganda value for "colletivism" would be given by a success of state funded and managed epidemic response are very real, here is the arch-capitalist Bloomberg praising some "road to serfdom" collectivist hellholes:

      https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/crisis-showcases-corner-of-europe-belittled-by-trump-s-advisers
      «In the 21st century’s toughest test yet of governing, the Nordics stand out. After almost a year of the pandemic, the region’s societal model has made it “the most promising” in charting a sustainable path out of the crisis, according to the World Economic Forum. HSBC says that superiority is down to generous social safety nets and high digitization. It’s already clear that Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland have suffered a smaller economic setback during the Covid crisis than the euro zone or the U.K. [...] According to the WEF’s December report on global competitiveness, the Nordic region is now best placed to achieve a “productive, sustainable and inclusive economic system.” In fact, the pandemic is positively showcasing the Nordic model after a period of controversy on its merits, including the 2018 accusation by advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump that the region proves how “socialism reduces living standards” and belongs in the same basket as Venezuela.
      [...] The Nordic countries all offer universal welfare support, including health care and generous unemployment assistance. That translates into less concern over lost jobs and income than elsewhere, paving the way for economic activity to resume quicker when restrictions are finally removed, according to HSBC economist James Pomeroy.
      »

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  2. «The more mundane truth is that the countries that have done best either already had a relatively well-funded public health infrastructure that had been tested in previous epidemics (not only in Asia but in parts of Africa too), or they took the decision to implement strict measures early in 2020 as a precaution.»

    As BusinessWeek (and others) correctly observe, the much better health and GDp outcomes of places like China-mainland or south Korea can be "blamed" on extensive testing, and tracing and isolation of the infectious, after a short initial period of national lock-down while the test-trace-isolate system is ramped up to scale, after which national lock-downs are no longer needed:

    https://www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/a-guide-to-2021-covid-vaccines-stimulus-sanity
    «The flailing in Washington and state capitals looks even worse when juxtaposed with the success of China, which clamped down on Covid with compulsory mask wearking isolation of the sick, and effective contact tracing. Chinese are blithely eating in restaurants, sitting in theaters, attending school, and going back to work. On Jan. 18 the government reported GDP grew 2.3% in 2020, which makes China the only major economy to to avoid a contraction for the year. [...] The pandemic slammed the U.K.'s economy worse than any other member of the Group of Seven nations, with GDP declining an estimate 10.3%, vs. about 3.6% in the U.S. [...] in South Korea, which has fought the pandemic almost as successfully as China, President Moon Jae-in is able to focus on a secondary issue, making housing more affordable.»

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-01/coronavirus-pandemic-how-the-u-s-can-implement-rapid-covid-testing
    «testing can help close the gap between normalcy and where we are. If Americans want to safely send kids to school, eat in a cafe, go to a basketball game, or get on a plane, the U.S. needs to test a lot more people a lot faster. Faster, cheaper testing may not flag every new case of Covid, but that shouldn’t mean settling for the current level of blindness, with its torturous drip of preventable deaths. Even world-class testing won’t rid us of the virus, but it can allow us to live our lives in the meanwhile. [...] By early March, the U.S. was struggling to run 1,000 tests a day, while South Korea, which confirmed its first case the same day the U.S. did, was running 10,000. By the end of that month, lab giants Abbott Labs, Hologic, LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics, and Roche had rolled out U.S. tests of their own. But at $100 to $150 apiece, they were expensive, and labs were short on technicians trained to run them. Long, complex supply chains led to further shortages, from the swabs needed to gather nasopharyngeal samples to the reagents used to process the tests. [...] According to his modeling, testing just half the population every three days would bring Covid under control within weeks. [...] As Hanage, Mina’s colleague at Harvard, points out, South Korea succeeded in corralling the virus by relentlessly tracking down those put at risk by each discovered case, not by reinventing testing. “All of these extraordinarily smart people are coming up with extraordinarily smart things,” Hanage says, “and we haven’t done the basic things right.”»

    https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/29/asia/taiwan-covid-19-intl-hnk/
    «Authorities activated the island's Central Epidemic Command Center, which was set up in the wake of SARS, to coordinate between different ministries. The government also ramped up face mask and protective equipment production to make sure there would be a steady supply of PPE. The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing. Former Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist by training, said [...] "Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.»

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  3. «In other words, it was down to planning and experience or pre-emption. Both of these ultimately reflect political decisions, not broader cultural norms.»

    The issue with test-trace-isolate is that it is incompatible with reaganism/thatcherism because:

    * It requires raising taxes to fund preparedness and then scaling up of the public health system and of compensation for the infectious being isolated.

    * It demonstrates that public issues can be solved by state funded and managed projects, and that is "propagand for collectivism".

    * The alternative of half-baked national lock-downs only mildy inconveniences tory voters, who mostly live in spacious homes with large gardens, if not mansions in private parks, and whose income mainly comes from capital or from professional work that can be done from home. Too bad for the little people, whether running small businesses or workers.

    * The alternative of half-baked national lock-downs puts the blame for the spread of the epidemic on individuals rather than the government ("Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives").

    * Emphasizing the role of vaccines and doing a bit marketing push for big USA-UK corporates like Pfizer and AstraZeneca as saviours of humanity is more ideologically correct than "collectivism".

    For reaganistas/thatcherites a few dozen/hundred thousands deaths, many more brutal illnesses, and a big drop of GDP are prices well worth paying to avoid the evils of "collectivism" like this:

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/05/south-korea-covid-quarantine-britain-tested-positive
    «To sum up the complicated arrival process at Seoul: I was required to download a Covid-19 tracking app, had my temperature checked and was whisked away by pre-approved taxis to the public clinic nearest to my home to take a PCR test. I was then required to self-isolate for more than two weeks at home.
    Once at home, I had minimal contact with my parents, both of whom wore masks the entire time and who quickly indicated that I should stay in my room. The test results came back the next morning and I was surprised to find out that I was positive, since I had no symptoms. What shocked me was that officials from the local district’s public health service then came to take me to a government facility. Not long after I was taken away, more officials in full PPE came to disinfect our apartment, check on my parents and tell them to get tested.
    Self-quarantining at home if you have Covid-19, no matter how mild the symptoms, is not an option in Korea. Thus began my 14-day stay in a youth hostel in the heart of Seoul that had been converted to a quarantine facility for mildly symptomatic Covid-19 patients. [...] For 14 days, no one could leave their rooms. We were allowed to open the door only to pick up food delivered to us or to put out our rubbish, which we had to treat with disinfectant. [...]

    Despite these restrictions, however, two things stood out.
    * First was the level of service on offer. Every patient was provided with a box of “essentials” such as body wash, shampoo, conditioner, toothbrushes, shaving kits, two types of disinfectant, masks, towels and slippers. The food was equally good, better than the most expensive Korean restaurants I had visited in London. These were all provided free for Korean citizens. The nurses and doctors at the facility would check on each patient twice daily, communicating via an app, asking us to measure our blood pressure and temperature and whether we needed medicine. They even offered counselling services to those who were mentally exhausted.
    * The second was the emphasis on solidarity. The medical staff regularly expressed their regret that we were in this position. They emphasised, however, that we had to do it for others. The message was that by temporarily giving up our freedom, we were keeping others safe.
    »

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    1. «The alternative of half-baked national lock-downs only mildly inconveniences tory voters, who mostly live in spacious homes with large gardens, if not mansions in private parks, and whose income mainly comes from capital or from professional work that can be done from home.»

      As to this, consider a very public group of upper-middle and upper-class people with "professional" jobs, that are almost all middle aged or older: Members of Parliament and Lords of the Realm.

      How many bye-elections of MPs who died of infection have there been? How many had to be put in intensive care after getting infected? How many did get infected?

      A french author wrote several decades ago: “There is more in common between two members of parliamen, one of whom is a Communist, than between two Communists, one of whom is a member of parliament.

      Delete
  4. A couple of other relevant links on test-trace-isolate:

    * NN Taleb stating the obvious and an agent based simulation confirming it with very clear graphs that reflect the difference between some countries:
    https://twitter.com/dzviovich/status/1305230400072175621
    «I believe that overactive testing (even if high error rate) + masks + constraining superspreaders effectively allow you to keep functioning. Cheaper than lockdowns.»

    * Bloomberg on Minnesota being "progressive" doing mass testing:
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-14/covid-testing-minnesota-is-the-best-state-for-checking-for-coronavirus
    «Get everybody in an entire state to spit into a tube? You betcha.
    [...] Positivity rates, hospitalization rates, intensive care capacity, R-naught, lives lost: There are so many ways to describe the contours of the Covid‑19 pandemic and measure its devastation. Every one of them was moving in the wrong direction by late autumn, first in the states around Minnesota—the Dakotas, Iowa, Wisconsin—then in Minnesota itself. That’s when the state government began an ambitious effort to encourage every resident to be tested—easily, quickly, and for free.
    [...] Minnesota isn’t the biggest state or the wealthiest. But it has a progressive governor, a budget surplus that’s allowed it to supplement federal funding and spend about $150 million on testing so far, and a well-functioning pandemic task force. It’s home to the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota, one of the nation’s best public research institutions. All those advantages may explain why it’s one of the few states to implement a testing strategy that the federal government should have adopted, one that helped Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan avoid the worst of the pandemic’s ruin, and that doesn’t require dramatic scientific advances or carry any potential health risks.
    [...] About 400,000 of the state’s 5.6 million residents had tested positive, and the Oakdale lab had processed more than 800,000 tests. “It’s worse than what I expected it to be,” Ward says of the autumn and early winter. “I expected it to be bad. But I didn’t know what bad looked like.”
    »

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  5. Thatcher changed the UK into a loose society from a tighter one. She weakened social bonds and created distrust, helped by some poisonous newspapers. Whether a society is loose or tight isn't a given: politicians could move the dial back.

    Guano

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    1. «Thatcher changed the UK into a loose society from a tighter one.»

      My guess is that thatcherism indeed made it looser, but I think that the loose-tight duality is overrated, and I agree with D Timoney that “reflect political decisions, not broader cultural norms”, because:

      * For a long time England has been compared to other places, and as some politicians remarked, a nation (below the elites) of "compliers", or perhaps conformists, with "mind your station" fully internalized by the servant classes. That cannot be upturned in a few decades.

      * The hard lock-down started in March was widely respected. I saw Cambridge in July-August at the peak of the tourist season and it was completely deserted.

      * The japanese and the koreans may have a more collectivist culture, but the chinese whether mainland or Tawain, or the kiwis, are pretty individualistic and unruly.

      * Ultimately within a wide range what makes the difference is the will of the government, and the respect that whether individualist or collectivist citizen accord to the government's policies, and the will of the government to enforce them; for example the hard lock-downs in Wuhan while the government prepared test-trace-isolate were enforced sometimes pretty brutally in the face of some local attempts to riot and break through the isolation boundaries.

      Delete
    2. Thatcher changed the UK into a loose society from a tighter one.

      That is called "social engineering" and that the Conservatives engage in it extensively is supported by some of my usual quotes:


      * M Thatcher to F Hayek in 1982 about turning the UK into a Pinochet economy:
      «I was aware of the remarkable success of the Chilean economy in reducing the share of Government expenditure substantially over the decade of the 70s. The progression from Allende's Socialism to the free enterprise capitalist economy of the 1980s is a striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons. [...] Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time.»

      * ConservativeHome.com:
      There were even prophetic council house sales by local Tories in the drive to create voters with a Conservative political mentality. As a Tory councillor in Leeds defiantly told Labour opponents in 1926, ‘it is a good thing for people to buy their own houses. They turn Tory directly. We shall go on making Tories and you will be wiped out.’ There is much of the Party history of the twentieth century in that remark.

      * N Clegg interviewed in 2016:
      «Is it true that when Clegg suggested there needed to be more social housing, Cameron told him it only turned people away from the Tories? “It would have been in a Quad meeting [the committee of Cameron, George Osborne, Clegg and Danny Alexander], so either Cameron or Osborne. One of them – I honestly can’t remember whom – looked genuinely nonplussed and said, ‘I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters.’ They genuinely saw housing as a Petri dish for voters.»

      Whether a society is loose or tight isn't a given: politicians could move the dial back.

      That is a bit of overselling, it takes a long time to change rooted cultures. As to “move the dial back” that seems overselling too, as England in particular has always been a bit individualistic, for example here is that aspect as viewed from a scot, as of 1976, before M Thatcher could do her social engineering:

      https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/10/andrew-ohagan-george-orwell-memoriallecture
      Long after the English had gone south, for years actually, my family discussed the horror of that summer invasion, but I found myself wondering about them. Who were these exotic beasts, the English? They seemed to be individualists - at any rate, they weren't a family in the same way we were. [...] But my first experience of the English left me with the beginnings of a theory - that whereas the Scots and Irish were a people, a definite community, innately together and full of songs and speeches about ourselves, the English were something else: a riot of individualism with no real sense of common purpose and no collective volition as a tribe.

      Delete
  6. So test-trace-isolate is obviously a "pet peeve" of mine, and here are two further relevant quotes hopefully the last one in this "quote-bombing" series. They show that very belatedly *some* public figures in the UK have opened their less parochial eyes to the success of test-trace-isolate in other countries:

    https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/01/the-vaccine-is-not-enough-we-need-a-zero-covid-strategy/
    «Tens of thousands of lives would have been saved if the British state had simply done what many other countries did and followed a Zero Covid policy. One shocking comparison stands out for me in highlighting the sheer scale of the needless loss of life: in the first 14 days of 2021 alone, there were 12,503 Covid deaths in the UK. That is significantly more than the 7,200 combined death toll of all the countries following a Zero Covid plan throughout the entire pandemic. In other words, the UK has had more deaths in two weeks than China, South Korea, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Vietnam have had put together over the last 12 months, despite these countries having a combined population 25 times bigger than the UK. It’s been obvious for months that a Zero Covid strategy is the way forward. New Zealand admits to following the same model as the UK at one stage before seeing the looming dangers, dropping it, and adopting the model followed by East Asian countries. New Zealand’s tiny death toll of 25 was the result. [...]
    This failure to pursue a Zero Covid plan goes well beyond Tory incompetence. It’s rooted in the domination of neoliberalism at the heart of the British state, entrenched over the past four decades. When the state needs to act in a crisis, it turns first to failing corporate giants whose role is profit maximisation, not the social good. This is the result of the ideological thinking that dominates the British capitalist class, as well as the cronyism of a self-serving elite, but it also reflects a reality of a state hollowed out by decades of privatisation and cuts. The refusal to go for Zero Covid is also rooted in a fear that its policy solutions would set a dangerous precedent with a greater role for the state in serving the people, rather than being there to bail out capitalist interests.
    Zero Covid isn’t a socialist solution per se – as can be seen by the diversity of the nations that have employed it. But it is certainly a rejection of neoliberal cornerstones
    »

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/27/five-ways-the-government-could-have-avoided-100000-covid-deaths
    «While the number of UK deaths has entered the hundreds of thousands, New Zealand has recorded only 25 deaths from Covid-19 so far. Taiwan has recorded seven, Australia 909, Finland 655, Norway 550 and Singapore 29. These countries have largely returned to normal daily life. [...]
    Countries that managed to effectively contain Sars-CoV-2 implemented screenings of new arrivals and 14-day quarantines for those entering the country. [...]
    The second fatal flaw in the UK’s response happened on 12 March, when the government made the fatal decision to stop community testing, abandoning its line of sight over who had the virus and where it was spreading. Community testing is absolutely vital for controlling the virus. This was later resumed, but England outsourced testing and tracing to private firms instead of using local public health capacity.
    Isolation – a key part of the test, trace, isolate response – was only ever an afterthought, and there has been little support for people who would struggle to stop working for 14 days. Even now, the majority of people have been refused a discretionary self-isolation payment, while statutory sick pay is a paltry £95.85 a week. By contrast, Finland and Norway offer 100% and 80% of income to people who are self-isolating. The result of the UK’s inadequate support is that many who have tested positive have ended up going into work and infecting others. [...]
    »

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    1. «here are two further relevant quotes hopefully the last one in this "quote-bombing" series.»

      So another two, from early 2020, to show also that test-trace-isolate was well known even at the beginning, this is from May 4th, 2020:

      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/04/eight-lessons-controlling-coronavirus-east-asian-nations-pandemic-public-health
      «We are now almost four months into this pandemic, and the lessons that can be drawn from east Asian countries on how best to control this coronavirus and keep daily new cases as low as possible are clear. [...]
      The first is to aggressively identify where the virus is and break chains of transmission. This requires a “test, trace, isolate” policy that involves mass community testing, tracing those who had been in contact in the previous week with any individual testing positive, and putting all of those individuals into a mandatory quarantine. Governments and local municipalities would have to recruit and train foot soldiers to carry this out. While testing itself is not a solution, it is a crucial part of a package of public health interventions needed to keep identifying clusters of infection and breaking these apart.
      The third is to keep constant surveillance of the virus using tracking systems to detect whether certain parts of the country are becoming hotspots and whether sub-populations, such as migrants living in close quarters, have a higher incidence of the virus. [...]
      The seventh lesson is that lockdowns, if introduced early and quickly, can slow the spread of the virus, but are not a solution by themselves. They are a costly and crude policy instrument that should be used as sparingly as possible. They allow governments to buy time and use this time to massively increase important public health infrastructure.
      »

      This is from April 14th, 2020 just 3 weeks after the start of lock-down:

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/england-coronavirus-testing-has-not-risen-fast-enough-science-chief
      «Sir Patrick Vallance’s comments echo those of Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, who said a week ago that Germany “got ahead” in testing people for Covid-19 and that the UK needed to learn from that.
      So far, the government has prioritised tests for seriously ill patients in hospital and frontline NHS staff. But Vallance said testing needed to be done at sufficient scale “to look at outbreaks and isolate”, as has happened in countries such as Germany and South Korea. “I think at the beginning Public Health England [PHE] got off to a good start in terms of testing to try and make sure they caught people coming into the country with it,” he told ITV’s weekly Coronavirus Q&A show. “I then think it’s not scaled as fast as it needs to scale – and that’s being done now. But I do think testing is an incredibly important bit of this. It needs to be done at scale, and it needs to be able to be done rapidly enough to look at outbreaks and isolate.” [...] When asked why Germany – which in the week ending 4 April was carrying out an average of 116,655 swab tests a day – had been able to test so many people and keep deaths relatively low, Vallance said testing was “an incredibly important part of how we need to manage this going forward”. However, he added, there were “all sorts of reasons” why Germany had had only 3,194 deaths at that time, compared with 11,329 in UK hospitals, cautioning that its high volume of testing should not be automatically linked with the low death toll.
      »

      The test-trace-isolate strategy is not something new and weird one invented in early 202 by prof. Vallance or by prof. Sridhar or by some foreign "egghead" in China or south Korea, it has been known for *thousands of years*.

      Part of the reason I have provided all these quotes here is that I hope those reading them will spread them around, to ensure that many more people understand why the epidemic in the UK (and the USA) has been handled in a certain way.

      Delete
  7. I'm not happy with the terms "Loose" and "Tight" either. They appear to have been used so as to avoid terms like "collective action", "cooperative", "socialist", "social capital" (Robert Putnam), "high trust society". The ability to take collective action is partly a long-term issue (as in Robert Putnam's study of two regions of Italy) but is also partly something that can be created (or destroyed) by short-term political action.

    The missing element for control of the pandemic is now support to people so that they can self-isolate (after test and trace). Addressing that issue would open up to scrutiny the whole world of precarious employment, zero-hours contracts, the labyrinths of Universal Credit, the inadequacies of sick pay. This is why the government doesn;t want to do it.

    Guano

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  8. «The missing element for control of the pandemic is now support to people so that they can self-isolate (after test and trace).»

    I understand that I posted too many quotes and you can't be bothered to read them, but they make clearl that what is missing is "test and trace" itself in the UK and other thatcherite/reaganista countries.

    Because it is not just compensation for isolation of the infected that is incompatible with thatcherism, but the state funding and operating of mass test-and-trace system, and the success of such "collectivist" mass test-and-trace system.

    Because once you have mass test-and-trace in place the number of infectious becomes minuscule, and the cost of compensating them for isolating them is negligible. For example in the past year the total/cumulative number of infected people in China-Taiwan, not of the hospitalized or deaths, has been less than 1,000; the number of deaths is so low that 1 death gets on the national news:

    https://www.cdc.gov.tw/en/Disease/SubIndex/

    Given that the UK Chief Science Officer and Chief Medical Officer advocated publicly a Taiwan-style system in early 2020, the UK government has been fully aware of it, so their adoption of a different system can only be due to wilful political and ideological reasons, not to ignorance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. «the number of deaths is so low that 1 death gets on the national news»

      This is from a week ago:

      https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4115740
      “Taiwan's 8th coronavirus fatality was woman in her 80s
      2021/01/30 14:45”

      Delete
  9. At the moment there is a need for Support to Isolation, so as to amke T and T work (as well as a better public T and T system).

    Guano

    ReplyDelete