How the Lockdown Ends

In his book Hitch -22: A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens describes Salman Rushdie's experience living under a fatwa against him. Rushdie had to live in hiding, though he eventually re-emerged.

Salman began making ventures in travel, testing the walls of the prison that he had to cart, almost tortoise-like, around with him. Vaclav Havel agreed to receive him in Prague. President Mary Robinson of Ireland had him to Dublin. He continued pushing at the bars and restrictions, refusing to allow himself to be immured or obliterated. 

This describes a man who initially hides himself away from a very real threat, but who eventually grows weary of this life and tests the boundaries. Each venture further emboldens him, and he eventually emerges again as a public figure. 

I suspect something like this will happen with the coronavirus lockdown. There won't be an official "all-clear", just as there was no official end to the fatwa against Rushdie. People will simply tire of it. They will gradually become less observant of safety protocols. The "scolds" will be in the minority and they'll know it, so moral suasion will no longer be an effective way of getting compliance. More and more businesses will open, despite not having the official go-ahead from their state government. ("So sue me. See how that worked out in Ohio.") I think sheer laziness and inertia will eventually steer us back to normal. At-risk individuals will still wisely maintain a safe distance, but the majority of the population will gradually lose their fear of the virus after the novelty has worn off. 

All bets are off here if the virus really comes roaring back. If easing the lockdowns leads to a huge spike in active cases or deaths, I think people really will re-learn their fear and return to their sanctuaries. The coming weeks will tell, but so far this doesn't seem to be happening. 

Nobody will eat crow. Everybody will think that they were "right all along." Coronavirus "minimizers" will compare the projected deaths to the realized total and say, "See, this was just a bad flu season. No big deal." Coronavirus "alarmists" will say, "It would have been much worse if not for the lockdown." Neither is being serious about counterfactual thinking. The minimizers aren't acknowledging that the virus would probably have spread farther without any kind of lockdown, and the alarmists aren't acknowledging that individuals and businesses would have taken precautions regardless of what their state governments told them to do. Anyway, most people don't have well-defined opinions. Alarmists who were insisting that we absolutely needed the lockdown won't be embarrassed if we ease lockdowns and nothing terrible happens. They'll reason something like, "I always thought we should trust the experts to decide when it's time to reopen. We began a gradual reopening at the appropriate time, with politicians following expert advice about the timing." (Reopening due to judicial decisions, like in Ohio and Wisconsin, are pseudo-random policy changes that mess with the "just following expert judgment" story, but that point will be easily dismissed.)  Not having made any definite prediction, nobody will feel compelled to reevaluate their worldview. We will ease into a post-lockdown world and people will simply ease into their new talking points, as if acclimating to a slightly too-warm bath. People mostly sleep-walk into their opinions. Few will stand athwart history yelling "Stop!" They will mostly continue to follow Jonathan Haidt's "elephant rider" model, whereby the elephant goes wherever it wants to go and the rider, while managing to steer the beast very slightly, convinces himself that "This is what I wanted him to do." This is an almost perfect analogy for how people change their minds in practice.

As much as I prefer the strategy of simply becoming inured to the risk, I do wish there was more introspection about where we went wrong (oh, there is plenty of extrospection!). But the combination of shallow opinion-holding, exhaustion, and sheer inertia will lead us more quickly to a post-lockdown world. Even though nobody will have learned anything about anything. 

I am noticing examples of this in my personal life. I have a healthcare worker in my home. For a while she was showering each day after returning from work. That has stopped, and without any commentary or without anyone batting an eye. (She of course follows other safety protocols, like wearing a mask and gloves at work and changing out of work clothes. This is just one extra above-and-beyond level of hygiene that's being discarded.) My in-laws stayed home for two months without venturing out for anything. My wife brought them groceries, but physically kept her distance. Then three weeks ago, we all met up for a family gathering. It included my wife and kids, my wife's parents, her brother, and her aunt and uncle. It was a foregone conclusion that they would not "social distance" from their adorable grandchildren. There was lots of hugging. We met up again two weeks later, and we were even more lax about "distancing" protocols. On the first meetup, we were very careful about who touched which utensils to serve themselves various dishes. On the second, we were all reaching into open bags of chips and serving ourselves dip from the same spoon. (Everyone was careful to wash their hands, I should add.) There was no discussion of relaxing safety protocols, no meeting where we analysed the virus' prevalence in our community and thus downgraded our assessment of the risk level. It just kind of happened. And I suspect my personal experience isn't unusual. None of this is to say "This is how it should be." This is more of an observation and prediction than a prescription. 

Returning to the passage above. Rushdie could have been gunned down the second he gained enough confidence to step out into the light. Under that counterfactual the reference would take on a very different meaning. Sometimes a fatalistically acclimating to a risk is the wrong strategy after all.  

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Back to "nobody will have learned anything about anything" for a moment. I feel like I've been doing an adequate job of updating as new information came in. Someone had asked me my opinion of the coronavirus in early March. My now slightly embarrassing answer was: 

Just a vague sense of “I've heard all this before.”

Which was a reference to scare-stories about the "avian flu" and "swine flu." And I shared this link of an early and too-optimistic take by Ron Bailey. I'm not too embarrassed. I always entertained the possibility that this could be really bad (and still do), though it's possible I rated the probability too low. It's clearly turning out to be milder than the most dire predictions.