Covid-19 and Governments: what may have caused so much myopia and what can be done about it

Why is it that the warnings from experts or from those experiencing the crisis in places like Italy that were hit hard early with Covid-19 were not loud enough to be heard or listened to?

Why have they not reached the critical threshold of credibility to trigger immediate, coordinated reactions and appropriate emergency measures?

What was left of how the French Administration retro-analyzed the H1N1 virus crisis

Following the H1N1 virus crisis, several reports were produced throughout 2010 at the request of the French parliament's sub-committee on cultural social and family affairs in 2009 and were presented to the French Senate.

They were focusing on life after the H1N1 crisis. In a way, it is reassuring that the reports addressed the type of issues encountered now with Covid-19 relatively well. And even better yet, the reports outlined what is needed to be prepared for the next pandemic having learned from many "anomalies" in the way the entire society behaved in France, including the government and the scientific community to name only a couple of bodies. It is not clear whether some or all of the recommendations were followed, nor if they were sufficiently efficient. Clearly the poor results today are not showing that the French administration could or knew how to make good use of them. Or maybe, the Covid-19 crisis was too different. Does that mean that learning from a virus crisis cannot really help prepare for the next one? Kind of worrying.

Institutions have short memories neglecting even their own lessons from H1N1. Learned lessons can be enshrined and imprinted within individuals, but not within institutions or crowds on a lasting basis. 

The reports raised several interesting questions.

For example, "isn't it true that a critical crisis challenges all established plans?[1]”

Also, "[during a crisis] control falls and existing paradigms do not work anymore. … the plans are pre-established and leaders have no time but executing what they have at hand" (but, usually pretty serious stuff)." "Classical references are destroyed and what follows is a context of ignorance" and hesitations given limited time available to make decisions and significant pressure to act quickly with high visibility.

"It is not as much about not having answers anymore but to know which questions to ask. And to change the pace and the pattern of attitudes and actions, one needs to get closer to the first liners and the citizens. If this bottom-up operating mode is not in place then people will go for a "bottom-bottom" activities as people will consider not being listened to and understood." Of course, this may lead to inappropriate populism with not enough safeguard.

The decline of well-polished rhetoric from the establishment in a time of crisis

Communication to the public does not generate trust during this type of crisis. One can see that official declarations during a hot crisis can be contradictory or at least inconsequential. The citizen may feel they "know better" and turn to friends, social media and the villages' gossip to decide what is right to do in a typical anarchy type mindset. The "wisdom of crowds" so popular in Silicon Valley in 2004 unfortunately does not work well in the context of a crisis as it is generating the wrong attitudes and gestures causing uncertainty and fear. Some people are putting other people at risk by thinking they have the necessary body of knowledge and experience to decide by themselves what's good for them (and others). This may in fact trigger a relapse of the epidemic. And insurgencies particularly in poor cities and suburbs.

As said in the reports to the French Senate, classic communication to the public can turn out to be inadequate as classical information dissemination is no longer sufficient to get support from the citizens. People seem to be eager to get opinions rather than information. But practically all they seem to care about is raw information, mostly from social media and obscure sources they circulate and share widely without any backing or verification by authorized sources or knowledgeable and credible people.

This is because information is everywhere all the time and competes with harassing repetitions and redundancies leaving no time for reflection. Everyone quotes everyone else with little or no background check. It is about virality more than it is about veracity[2]. The newest story is the most "interesting” and other important topics are quietly rendered irrelevant for the period. For example, no one is talking about climate change anymore. It has become a fragile information environment where convictions are hard to form and opinions falter. Everyday, the story changes with its dose of contradiction and inconsistency. It is fair to say that this is coming from everywhere, not specifically only from government authorities. However, the plurality of conflicting opinions amplified by the various channels of the media might also be the most effective mechanism for truth discovery. Killing the "noise," risks killing the signal. What emerges is confirmation bias, and extreme myopia as "crazy" ideas such as the earth revolving around the sun are tossed away and punished by death.

People witnessing that the judgement of experts has been discredited by reality now behave like experts themselves and as if they were right.

Confusing reports and poor reasoning have emerged in many countries. The ironic thing is that the politicians and experts are trying (their best?) to adjust in real time to an event that was not planned, much less anticipated. Their actions are surprising the population. As a result, they look like they have lost control when in fact they are trying hard to cope with the inundation of bad news coming from everywhere. They are continuously and creatively trying new things. But they do not get the desired results. This attitude is disorienting to people who end up believing their government is unable or ill-equipped to navigate, and therefore, they fumble.

People do not believe their leaders can or will making definitive decisions and stick to them anymore. It appears to the public that they are improvising when in fact they are trying to cope with a rapidly changing landscape. The population becomes impatient as it is staying at home managing the monotony of every day that passes by. People feel insecure and contest everything the government does with no real good constructive ideas to offer. Because they expect it will change its message again. They also challenge the classical media as they find they are repeating the same stories all day long. We tend to protect our convictions. And we turn to good common sense in the absence of strong, stable scientific judgment. Does not help really.

The catastrophe was coming. There was recklessness among leaders as well as within the establishment; they were caught off guard. The problem is also that the mutation of the virus is hard to grasp and it has forced the authorities to change the way they had to deal with it several times.

Why political leaders do not (want to) believe catastrophic things are coming

Of course, no one like catastrophes! Especially when they are depicted as unprecedented of gigantic size (probably exaggeration). They are hard to believe, read and adapt to. People and algorithms like to use known past events to predict or be prepared for the future and they do not like things that have never happened in some way before. Which is what we have with Covid-19.

Another interesting reason why this dyslexia happened in many countries is that these events are not linear in the way they develop; they are exponential. The human brain knows how to predict in a linear fashion, but seems to have a difficult time dealing with exponentiality and assessing the related risks, making this crisis scary.

There is a Titanic drama component in what happened. The Titanic’s wireless operator did not consider a key iceberg warning as important enough to inform the captain immediately (same thing that happened with covid-19 in China and Italy before it came to France). The captain was also warned he was traveling too fast in a region known to contain icebergs, but he was more interested in crossing the Atlantic faster that his sister ship, the Olympic. He thought a collision could be avoided as the Titanic was a new kind of sophisticated ship. He probably thought every dangerous situation and the associated risks would remain under control.

Among our leaders, it is very likely that there was a belief that with sophisticated defense systems and processes in place to combat a new virus and contain it, there would not be unmanageable surprises.

There's also a Space Shuttle Challenger disaster component to this. "The Rogers Commission found NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been key contributing factors to the accident"[3].

How do you know the various input you get has met sufficient challenges when you are the boss? This is where leaders need a CJO, or Chief Jester Officer, a sort of court jester or a King fool of the medieval era allowed to tell some tough truths narrated as funny jokes that nobody else from the court would dare say. The organizational culture here in the Covid-19 crisis is probably the most important culprit of what caused the lack of adequate rapid ad-hoc reactivity and preparedness.

Also, there may very well be an effect of the Abilene paradox in the way leaders and their top chiefs have not been able to stay "tuned in" to receiving the counter opinions of a few people whose different insights could have helped.

Conformity is king when consensus thinking is a strong desire or requirement, but unfortunately it is not a cure. It is said that the ancient Jewish tribunal Sanhedrin's members may have avoided group thinking and the symptoms of defective decision‐making.[4]

The danger of group thinking and consensus-based convictions was front page during the first weeks of the crisis: scientific experts were quoting each other to reassure themselves (they believed honestly in what they were saying, of course) and the politicians. No time for a quest for other opinions. Urgency became emergency. Leaders like the consensus of the scientific experts and the absence of viable counter opinions which they do not seek sufficiently. They give the scientific experts a role they did not ask for in the first place and that is to make decisions by massively influencing the nonscientific politicians because "there is nothing else". But science is not good decision making. Who else do you want to trust after all? And what's left for politicians to do if they want to try unorthodox things when "what is not normal is considered not scientific."

What is crucial is the scientific process, which is a competitive process based on disagreements about the validity and relevance of different research hypotheses. This process is especially important when it comes to new problems – such as a new virus, which spreads in unheard-of ways and has unheard-of effects

Dealing with doubt, declining trust and uncertainty

How to manage trust and doubt? How to insert periodically some iconoclast thinking in the processes of government and of the main economic actors? So that the worst can be factored in. And dealt with.

Again, the exponential nature of the virus events are known to be poorly managed by the human brain versus linear evolution. This is probably why people think that AI and Big Data could not help predict the disaster better despite major achievements in helping with the fight against the virus.

What is required is to learn how to fight exponentiality with exponentiality[5]

Obsessive optimization and maximization with powerful algorithms used everywhere on the internet and in our private life showed their limits in not being programmed to also factor in alerts and unconventional signals about unpredictable outcomes and events.

Modelling the world has not really delivered what was needed urgently to plan and go against the epidemic as it deployed itself. For example, the IHME models in the US tried to predict the medical resources necessary state by state. It was overly pessimistic. The shortages in most cases did not materialize.

Hope for the future

To what extent can governments rely solely on experts and will they be doing so in the future? How far in advance should experts dare make recommendations when they do not know what might happen and when their opinions are based on past realities that do not fit with the present chock? Their indirect adverse contribution to the doubts felt by the population should be factored in, but not to the point of paralyzing any innovative new ideas or solutions. The same experts and others can clearly deliver a different picture if they are freed from some conventions and formalism.

Alas, they sometimes think that just saying "we don't know" is fair and well accepted, but it is not true. People expect convincing or inspiring stories able to generate trust and confidence. Experts need to explain what they are going to try and do, not what that they don't know and that they are discovering new facets of Covid-19 every day. Which is not reassuring at all.

It is difficult to believe that all governments failed at preparing and dealing with the pandemic even if some seem to have done better so far. But it is fair to say that we were expecting to be better protected, but can governments do that well enough? And how much should we count on them given the way they behaved before and during this crisis? Can the ideal solution be more government and experts optimized with a few cultural and managerial tweaks? This seems unsatisfying as it represents linear thinking. At best we get a 2.0 version… an improvement of the sub-optimal. What seems to be needed is a major deviation of the way people look at addressing the crisis with more audacity and imagination involving more "unusual suspects". And also decentralize way more not only the decisions and the related responsibilities so that decisions can be made and executed accordingly. There are many super smart and responsible people on the field. And one region or state in a Federal Country can learn from the others and share its experience. This is one good way to decouple biased centralized political influence and the need to move fast and efficiently on the field. Decentralizing augments fruitful trials and errors.

We, of course, need more time to assess what worked and what did not. To get better prepared for the next epidemic. And do more, better to protect and save lives.

[email protected]

Special thanks to Derek Au , a former colleague in Silicon Valley.

I mentioned several sources I used. I may have used stuff from other people I do not remember. Sorry if it is the case and I'll be happy to include their names and organizations if they feel like they need it. And I thank all of them anyway.

April 26,2020

[1] M. Patrick Lagadec, research director at the French Ecole Polytechnique back in 2010

[2] Andrew Liptak

[3] The Rogers Commission found NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been key contributing factors to the accident

[4] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/17511341211236228/full/html

[5] David Benjamin and David Komlos