Reopening from COVID-19 Lockdowns

One of the very frustrating aspects of both media reporting on, and the responses by governors to this Covid-19 pandemic - forget the WH briefings, those are comic-tragedies - is the single-minded focus on testing as a gateway to reopening.

All we hear from the governors and the media is the hype about the testing, testing testing which is needed before States can begin to reverse the lockdown. However, no clear metric is given what level of testing (or even precisely what kind of testing - confirm COVID-19, or confirm anti-bodies) is considered sufficient to allow the economy to be re-opened.

I have the uncomfortable feeling, that especially the Media are focused on testing because Trump (but also the States) obviously failed in providing testing capability early on, and the Media love to keep bludgeoning Trump with this early failure. With their backward focus and hyperbolic coverage, the Media reporting and endless Governor press-conferences seems designed more to panic the public rather to inform us.

It should be obvious by now, that the testing capability and the so-called contact tracing everyone is talking about, let alone the vaccine, will not be available for months, if ever. Thus, a more reliable gating metric is needed, such as the R0 metic, the “Basic Reproductive Number”. It depends on the virus’ “latent period” (time from infection to infectiousness) and the infectious period, both of which are admittedly difficult to determine - see Emerging Infectious Diseases, CDC, pre-release, July 2020 (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article).

A different metric, R(t) or RT, the Effective Reproductive Rate, or Reproductive Rate over time, is calculated (with some sophisticated statistical methods) from the the number of new cases which appear each day (note dependence on testing). There is a very interesting Blog post by  Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram (“The Metric We Need to Manage COVID-19 - Rt: the effective reproduction number”, http://systrom.com/blog/the-metric-we-need-to-manage-covid-19/), which advocates calculating this R(t) statistic for each State as a realistic gating metric for allowing the slow and careful re-opening of each State’s economy.

I first stumbled on the use of R0 as a gating metric for slow and careful re-opening by following the German news (I’m originally from Germany). They made their decision when R0 reached 0.7, indicating that each infected person, on average, infects fewer than one other person. Since the partial opening on Monday, Apr. 20, the R0 metric has risen to 0.9, still below the magic number of 1.0.

All of these statistics, of course, suffer from a degree of uncertainty, dependent on knowledge of the infectious progression and the degree and accuracy of testing. In that connection it is worth reminding our politicians, that effective governing is policy making under uncertainty. It strikes me that the rote recital by Governors and Federal officials that “we need to follow science” is a way to avoid their responsibilities to make decisions in the face of uncertainty - even Science cannot always predict outcomes with 100% certainty, which is especially true in Social Science.

Here too, there are techniques available to make these uncertain decisions more robust - see for example “Robust Decision Making for Planning Under Deep Uncertainty” RAND Corp., 2013 - https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9701.html 

At this point it would be helpful if the media relaxed their hyper-partisan reporting and endless speculation, designed to increase the readership/viewerships in their respective camps, and concentrate on useful factual reporting, which can provide the public with realistic expectations on when we can expect the “lockdown” to be relaxed.

I have a lot of sympathy for the protest demonstrations in various State capitals to “open the economy” - these are the people who are trying to apply for unemployment benefits and waiting in line for food distribution, rather that the “talking heads” on TV, making their pronouncements about the need for continued lockdown from the comfort, safety and financial security of their homes. They need to be given realistic perspective rather than the very obscure, non-specific “testing, testing, testing”.