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I think the issue is that it is a collective action problem. No one person's actions on the margin are really making much difference to society-wide spread and

I think the issue is that it is a collective action problem. No one person's actions on the margin are really making much difference to society-wide spread and assuming you don't want to completely isolate yourself indefinitely, then your personal risk of contracting COVID is very sensitive to the level of infection in the society around you. In theory, we could achieve a higher average standard of living all around if we could coordinate everyone reducing their risky behavior by 30% (a number I just made up). This is the point that I think often gets missed in the discussion around "lockdowns". I would bet that we could actually reduce the spread of COVID quite substantially without a massive change in the living standards of most people. The problem is that there is a segment of people who refuse to do anything at all to reduce the risk of transmission so we end up having to take more extreme actions to compensate.

ghufran_syed 6y ago
>The problem is that there is a segment of people who refuse to do anything at all to reduce the risk of transmission so we end up having to take more extreme actions to compensate I think you might be missing the fact that if this segment of the population does increase transmission, it can only do so by the members of that segment getting infected, and that can only happen once per person as far as we know. So over time, you would expect that group to be less and less prone to infection, and therefore less able to pass on infection to others. So the more time goes by, the weaker this argument becomes.
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  Strictly speaking that is of course true, but I'm not sure it is relevant over the time scales we are concerned with. If there were only a handful of such people then they would all get infected relatively quickly and stop contributing to overall spread. And that may be the case in localized outbreaks, but I see their role overall as "seeding" individual hot spots. In other words, people who disregard basic social distancing protocols may not spread COIVD until it actually becomes prevalent in their local area. And when that happens they become the super-spreaders which cause new local outbreaks to fire up.

ghufran_syed 6y ago

>The problem is that there is a segment of people who refuse to do anything at all to reduce the risk of transmission so we end up having to take more extreme actions to compensate I think you might be missing the fact that if this segment of the population does increase transmission, it can only do so by the members of that segment getting infected, and that can only happen once per person as far as we know. So over time, you would expect that group to be less and less prone to infection, and therefore less able to pass on infection to others. So the more time goes by, the weaker this argument becomes.

thinkharderdev 6y ago
Strictly speaking that is of course true, but I'm not sure it is relevant over the time scales we are concerned with. If there were only a handful of such people then they would all get infected relatively quickly and stop contributing to overall spread. And that may be the case in localized outbreaks, but I see their role overall as "seeding" individual hot spots. In other words, people who disregard basic social distancing protocols may not spread COIVD until it actually becomes prevalent in their local area. And when that happens they become the super-spreaders which cause new local outbreaks to fire up.