Who Gets To Say “I told you so” About the Recent Surge in Covid?

I'm a little confused by the all the "I told you so" that I'm seeing. Clearly coronavirus cases and deaths have been increasing. Here are screenshots of cases and deaths that I just pulled today from this site. 

Who exactly gets to say, "See? I told you this would happen!" 

There are three basic categories of commentators on the coronavirus (three that I see anyway). One includes silly conspiracy theorists who don't think the coronavirus is real, or who think that the risks are being exaggerated in an explicit plot to control the population. They imagine politicians literally tenting their fingers and smirking about this power-grab. They imagine that Bill Gates is licking his lips over the prospect of injecting some kind of mind-control device via the mass vaccination program. To the extent that these people denied that the coronavirus was real or that it was a big deal, you could certainly tell them "I told you so". (Though they would probably respond by denying the truth of official death statistics, with the "public health" establishment just being a propaganda arm. My view is that public health statistics are often wrong, but not because of some kind of explicit conspiracy.) I mention the conspiracy theorists for the sake of completeness, but I will ignore them for the rest of this post.

Among more moderate views, there are virus "optimists" and "pessimists" (my terms). "Optimists" think that the virus is not such a big deal for young and healthy people, given the very low risk of death or serious complications. Broadly speaking, they are skeptical of government lockdowns and school closures. They think that the vast majority of us can go about our lives, so long as we protect the vulnerable. They see the risks of the coronavirus as comparable to other risks that are simply part of the ecosystem. They basically have signed on to the Great Barrington Declaration: costs of lockdowns and isolation are high and the benefits are small. The young and healthy should get through their bout with the coronavirus while the elderly and vulnerable are still isolating. Herd immunity through infection of the healthy is a viable option. I count myself in the "optimist" group. 

The pessimists are people who, broadly speaking, think everyone should be very worried about getting the coronavirus. Extreme caution is warranted by everyone in society. Broadly speaking they favor lockdowns, either self-imposed or government-imposed. (I think the word has gotten out that viral spread in schools is negligible, because I don't hear this crowd insisting on keeping the schools closed. Not anymore, anyway.) Here, I will fail an ideological Turing test, because I don't understand the pessimism. Either (1) they think the (quantitatively very low) risks to healthy people are a big deal, or (2) they think it's not possible to isolate this mass of healthy human spreaders from the vulnerable, or (3) they think there are unknown long-term health consequences of the coronavirus that we should take very seriously. (I regard (1) as unserious, because it's innumerate or irrational, considering that other background risks we find acceptable are much larger. I regard (2) as superficially plausible, but ultimately misguided. Shouldn't we build up herd immunity in a population that can "take it"? Aren't the vulnerable maximally "locked-down" at this point? I regard (3) as a valid concern that gets converted into Pascal's Mugging by wild speculation. It's something to monitor, for sure, but we shouldn't be up-ending society to hedge against this risk, which is present for almost everything*.) 

I think the pessimists were in favor of very extreme lockdowns and isolation at the very beginning, say in early to mid-March. The initial rationale was to flatten the curve, but the flattened curve was understood to have the same number of infections as the un-flattened curve. Once lockdowns were in place, the rationale changed to "completely squash the virus." The optimists were saying, "There is a scarce resource here." People's patience with isolation will eventually be spent, and they will emerge from their hiding places. We're merely delaying the curve, and we're doing so at very high cost. (Robin Hanson puts it well in this post from mid-March.) If you fail to utterly eliminate the virus via lockdowns (a goal whose impossibility was obvious by some time in March or April), then it will simply come roaring back once people emerge from lockdown and start skimping on hygiene and safety protocols. 

I get the sense that pessimists are saying, "See! The virus is surging again. There was no herd immunity. So checkmate, Great Barrington signers!" (I'm thinking of Tyler Cowen here. His commentary on the FDA's foot-dragging has been excellent, but his bashing of the Great Barrington crowd has been atrocious.) The optimists could rightly respond, "We told you that this thing would surge again. We told you the area under the curves was the same, and that you were just delaying the inevitable. So here it is, come roaring back." 

The pessimists are right to say "I told you so" to anyone who thought we'd already fully acquired herd immunity, although I'm not sure anyone on the optimist side was claiming that with any confidence. Then again, the surge has been smaller in places that were hard-hit in early March, so population-level immunity is having some effect. Look at the experience of New York and New Jersey. Governments can try to "flatten" all they like, but there's something to this idea that the area under the curve doesn't change. It just pushes the inevitable infections into the future. On this point, the optimists were right to say "I told you so." I think the experience in Sweden was legitimately a surprise to the optimists (note that deaths in Sweden are once again trending downward). 

Doesn't the vaccine change the equation here? As in, those viral infections were not in fact inevitable. Had we simply gotten the vaccine a month or two earlier, a very large number of infections to date would have been avoided. There is something to this, but it's impossible to make this argument without having known ex ante when the vaccines would be ready. In fact, I think the vaccine argument actually cuts both ways. We saw a huge resurgence of the virus before the vaccine came to save the day. Broadly speaking, pessimists were saying we should endure extreme isolation until a vaccine was ready, and optimists were saying that we can't count on the timing of the vaccine, which may take years or may in fact never come. It looks like two or three different vaccines are ready to deploy, and surely they will ensure that some people can avoid infection. It will truly reduce the area under the curve rather than simply shifting the curve into the future. But it's ambiguous who gets to say "I told you so" on this one. There are perfectly plausible counterfactuals in which the vaccine was ready months earlier; there are other perfectly plausible counterfactuals in which an effective vaccine was never developed. We will know in a few months how this has in fact played out, but that will be an ex post story. It could be that the virus starts to subside before an appreciable number of people have gotten the vaccine (optimists could then say, "I told you so."), or it could persist until vaccination is widespread (pessimists: "I told you so!"). We'll see. Ex ante, it seems unreasonable to tell young people to put their lives on hold for nine months until a vaccine comes along.

I wish we knew more about why cases and deaths started climbing when they did. The rise doesn't seem to correlate with any obvious policy change or behavioral change. Despite the impulse of some scolds to wag a finger at families celebrating Thanksgiving, it's not obvious (to me anyway, from a glance at the data) that there's a change in the trendline after the 26th. It's possible that most interventions just aren't doing much. That is, no business closures or mandates within the acceptable range (i.e. that state or local governments could actually get away with) have any appreciable effect on the spread of the virus. Indeed, if states that took more extreme measures had any effect on the virus, it's hard to see it in the data. There's a kind of "policy invariance" going on here. The same could be true of personal hygiene policies. Maybe that once-a-week venture to the grocery store is just enough exposure. Maybe it aerosolizes easily, such that masks are only marginally effective and it spreads via HVAC systems in large buildings. Maybe the virus has sufficient foothold to spread uncontrollably, and nothing short of total isolation would stop it. Maybe the virus has some kind of seasonality, like other respiratory viruses. Something in the virus's genetic program responds to the environment and says, "Reproduce like crazy when it's cold out, when your host is low in vitamin D, when the intensity of sunlight is low." People are quick to cherry-pick the few countries that tell smashing success stories (like China driving the virus away with draconian lockdowns, or South Korea successfully implementing contact tracing) and equally quick to overlook the counterexamples (Japan having a very low death rate despite a minimal and late response, Belgium and Spain having inexplicably high death rates despite intense lockdowns). There are things about the virus that we don't understand, and no tidy narrative captures the full worldwide range of outcomes. I'm not looking to do any kind of triumphal football-spiking to the pessimists who made a bunch of wrong predictions. A lot isn't known yet. It would just be nice to see a little epistemic humility here. 

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* I don't begrudge anyone their right to hedge against a risk they find unacceptable, even if I personally think they are being irrational. Everyone has a version of this. Survivalists hedge against the risk of civilization collapsing. Martial artists hedge against the risk of being assaulted and needing to fend off the attacker. Gun enthusiasts hedge against the risk of government turning tyrannical. In each case, there is a high chance that the hedge fails when the threat materializes. (Suppose the survivalist dies of malnutrition after civilization collapses, the martial artist is shot during a mugging, the gun enthusiasts are disarmed before they can mount a defense). Still, I don't begrudge these people their hobbies. Business people are speculative in the opposite direction; a few smashing successes exist for each failure. There are countless "hedges" against various kinds of risks, with different people picking different hobby-horses to be concerned about. Some very small number of them will eventually be able to say "I told you so." I welcome them to do so. But I wouldn't let them turn society upside-down, conscripting me into their crusade against an imagined risk. Recall that I'm specifically talking about the unknown long-term after effects of covid-19, not the known, quantifiable risks. 

I am noticing that you could flip the definitions of "optimist" and "pessimist" here. Optimists are in some cases saying "It's outside of our power to control this, though we can perhaps direct it a little," which I suppose sounds pessimistic. In contrast, pessimists are saying, "We can exert enormous control over this force of nature with the right policy tools and personal hygiene."  On the other hand, "optimists" do sound optimistic about the threat Covid-19 poses to the vast majority of the population, and pessimists really do sound pessimistic about those risks, in my opinion beyond what the raw statistics warrant.