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COVID-19 Four Corners looks back – ignores urgent need for Quarantine accommodation

By Arthur Dent - posted Friday, 3 April 2020


Likewise it makes total sense for those arrivals and other contacts who appear likely to be already infected to be isolated separately from others who are only being isolated as a precaution (whether those assumed to be infected are confirmed by test or not).

It does not require much in the way of brains to understand that with community transmission already under way in the largest three States everyone is currently "arriving" from a place with a higher rate of transmission (mixing with others outside) to a place with a lower rate ("stay at home").

It equally makes sense to isolate as many as possible of those actually infected or assumed to be infected who are now being told to self isolate at home in separate accommodation rather than infecting the rest of their household who are also required to isolate in order to avoid spreading that infection to other households.

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But there was no discussion of that at all. Nor have I seen any elsewhere.

I am sure the models would confirm that it is a much lower priority than measures that have been taken (belatedly) so far. That lower priority is because even if it could make a 100% difference between infection of 1 person and infection of 4 (which is far more than it could achieve), that is only a "once off" equivalent to one week of the recent rate of doubling. It is not an ongoing reduction in the rate and other measures were more urgent for achieving that.

But those remaining gaps and measures not yet taken to delay and lower the peak hitting the hospitals very soon are precisely what attention should be given to. Not the past or the more distant future.

Where are we now?

Worldwide it is still an impending health catastrophe developing into an ongoing current health catastrophe, especially for poor countries. Australia is several weeks behind Italy which is still in full catastrophe. A major campaign is being waged worldwide by the Wall Street Journal, assisted here by The Australian, for a more "proportionate" and "balanced" approach that trades off the number of avoidable deaths against avoidable damage to the economy. This "pro-death" campaign accelerates both health and economic catastrophe and is assisted by the rigid fixation of the rest of the media on breathless twittering about the past and the almost equally rigid fixation of actual decision makers on the "evidence based" present, both medical and financial.

Emergency Management in a pandemic is not about the past, nor the present but about the immediate future – the "future present" or "present future". Triage of planning resources in an exponential period means the present has already passed and cannot benefit from planning.

Unlike normal affairs in which events occur at certain rates whose variability and response to interventions is within the understanding and experience of decision makers, an infection that doubles every few days is the future happening right now. The future happens in the present "first gradually, then suddenly". It is what one has to orient to as happening right now from observation of the "road runner" cartoons running off a cliff with one's legs rotating rapidly. Collecting evidence about the initial rate of descent and the distance to the cliff edge is a cartoon staple for illustrating a ludicrous lack of orientation even for quadratic descent under gravitational acceleration. The initial exponential period of community transmission happens much more suddenly than falling off a cliff after the earlier seeding happened "gradually" with all attention trained on daily numbers.

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Given that the response eventually requires a full shutdown of non-essential activities while maintaining essential activities and intensifying emergency activities, the intertwining of health and economic measures necessarily requires war-time state capitalism rather than "stimulus". It isn't possible to make sense of what various governments and others are doing economically in the meantime so I am not attempting to.

What started gradually and was responded to by reassuring messages to the public that everything was under control (together with some measures to bring it under control) rapidly turned into something happening "suddenly" well inside the observation-orientation-decision-action loop of the decision makers responding to it so that they simply cannot prepare for what has already become inevitable. A pandemic is not an intelligent opponent to be taken by surprise. But it moves faster than decision makers can observe and then orientate before reaching a decision to take an action.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

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This article was first published on C21st Left.



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About the Author

Arthur Dent (formerly Albert Langer) is a left-wing political activist and an occasional contributor to the C21st Left blog.

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