Six Fallacies That Will Stall Covid-19 Recovery

Covid-19 lockdowns have loosened in the United States, even if local and state governments don’t know it. Apple AAPL cellular data show a surge in mobility since March, when the first stay-at-home orders took effect.

Vehicle traffic remains light in New York and California. But even with theaters, schools, shopping malls, churches, sports stadiums and other venues closed, families are finding reasons to venture forth in the post-coronavirus world.

Full recovery will take time, especially with a looming second wave of infections. Nature will not relent. Leaders hoping to reduce the devastation can control only the human response, which starts with strategy. To help rather than hinder the return to “normal,” people in positions of power must guard against six fallacies that can infect any healthy plan and spread like a virus.

One Size Fits All

The first fallacy is the notion that one size fits all when dealing with the same problem in different contexts. Policymakers fall into this trap when they issue executive orders that fail to distinguish between rural communities and densely populated cities.

They err again when they put young workers in the same category as the elderly, who carry significantly more risk. Or when they treat mom-and-pop shops like big-box retailers. Or when they assume that all individuals have equal capacity to hunker down for extended periods of time.

Working from home might be great for coders, but not wedding photographers. Online classes might make sense for history majors, but not trade school students. Sheltering in place might be romantic for newlyweds, but not battered wives. Centralized decision makers gloss over these differences.

Mandates Improve Safety

Regulators who mandate behavior usually do so with good intentions, trying to improve public health and safety. The effect is often the reverse.

Medical care got worse, not better, when central planners meddled at U.S. hospitals based on computer models that predicted bed and ventilator shortages. As a result, doctors and nurses with on-the-ground knowledge lost control.

Decisions to delay vaccinations and elective surgeries like hip replacements and hernia repairs came from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Even cancer treatments got postponed, putting thousands of lives at risk while forcing furloughs and pay cuts across the system.

That’s just one example of what can go wrong. A leveling process always occurs when regulators impose standards for entire groups. Low performers must rise to achieve the minimum threshold, which is great, but high performers reduce quality to meet the same level. “Flattening the curve” takes on a new meaning.

If anything goes wrong, barely compliant individuals or organizations have a built-in excuse to escape accountability. They can say they met all health and safety requirements. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo used the dodge after forcing nursing homes to take recovering coronavirus patients, leading to widespread death.

Survivors blamed the nursing homes, who blamed Cuomo, who blamed President Trump. “It’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidelines,” Cuomo said. “So they should ask President Trump.” Sadly, accountability disappears with mandates, along with leadership.

Numbers Don’t Lie

One-size-fits-all mandates often rely on statistics. Trusting data is good, but smart leaders also pay attention to the noise, which can be loud when dealing with something unknown like a new pandemic.

Determining the death rate of Covid-19, for example, requires two estimates: Total infections and fatalities. The math is simple division once researchers agree on the numerator and denominator, but coming to a consensus on either metric is difficult in the fog of a pandemic.

Testing and reporting standards, variance across regions, political bias and even financial incentives taint the data. This is especially true when comparing numbers across state lines and international borders. Coronavirus dashboards on sites like Axios create the appearance of precision with exact numbers updated daily, but the reality involves much more guesswork than the tables suggest.

The Washington Post has reported Covid-19 death rates as high as 5% in the United States. Modelers at Imperial College London estimated something closer to 1% in early February. The latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control put the “best estimate” at 0.4% for people who contract the disease and show symptoms.

That covers about two-thirds of cases, which means the overall death rate could be even lower. Studies at Stanford University and the University of Southern California suggest death rates in the range of 0.1% to 0.2% for all carriers, whether they show symptoms or not.

So, depending who you ask and when, the risk of dying from Covid-19 after exposure to the virus is about the same as dying from the flu or 50 times worse. That’s a wide margin. Leaders cannot necessarily wait for clarity, but they can recognize the uncertainty.

Problems Exist In Isolation

Policymakers and business leaders make a fourth mistake when they focus on part of a problem while ignoring the whole. Covid-19 represents a serious health hazard, but it does not exist in isolation from other issues that might be even deadlier.

Anne Marie Knott, a business professor at Washington University in St Louis, provides a timely reminder that heart disease remains the leading killer in the United States. In a separate column, she argues for a holistic approach to Covid-19. Humans are social creatures, not robots, and strategies for fighting the pandemic must consider all aspects of well-being. 

While staying home might reduce contagion, the tactic exacerbates problems related to loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, malnutrition, obesity and heart disease. Early reports already show rising suicides.

Blowing up the global economy to reduce Covid-19 deaths creates additional tradeoffs, which policymakers have a duty to articulate to the public.  

Poverty kills, even in the United States, and the problem is worse in developing countries. Going on lockdown might mean missing the Summer Olympics or a European vacation for some in society. But for others, it might mean loss of livelihood or even debtors prison for unpaid fines and fees. That’s not healthy.

Government Knows Best

A fifth fallacy is the notion that government-led strategies work best in uncertain times because people are ignorant and selfish and need to be protected from themselves.

Besides being false, this belief overlooks the fact that public officials are also human and susceptible to the same weaknesses as everyone else. Reliance on central planning also ignores the need for experimentation, which cannot occur when the government steps in and picks winners and losers. 

The potential for corruption is just one problem with the top-down approach. Powerbrokers trade favors, taking care of each other while ignoring the masses. They also make decisions based on political expediency, especially during election years.

Many government leaders, for example, recognize the risks of keeping the economy closed. But they delay action over fears of media criticism. Taking the blame for “just one death” is too great a risk, so they do nothing.

A bigger problem is lack of government omniscience. Even when public servants act with the highest integrity based on the best available information, they lack sufficient wisdom to micromanage something as complex as a pandemic.

Decades of innovation, which have allowed billions of people to lift themselves out of poverty, show that solutions to difficult problems most often emerge when individuals with different aspirations and abilities act on their own behalf.

People place their bets on competing strategies and move forward. Some ideas fail. Others succeed. Public and social sector organizations can play a positive role in the process, which I explain in a previous column. But winning answers rarely come from handpicked panels of experts who substitute their knowledge for the collective genius of everyone else.

Course Corrections Show Weakness

The final fallacy relates to the economic principle of sunk costs. Once people lock themselves into a strategy, they refuse to abandon it, even when new information points to a better way.

Some people even double down. Psychologists call this tendency “escalation of commitment.” Leaders guiding coronavirus policy engage in the blunder by tightening their control, even as the misery spreads.

When state and local officials announced their lockdown orders more than two months ago, the stated goal was to save hospitals from being overwhelmed. The overcapacity never happened, but rather than lift the quarantines, leaders moved the target.

An emphasis on “flattening the curve” shifted to universal Covid-19 testing. Now, people like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti say his city won’t fully open until a vaccine is developed, tested, mass produced and distributed.

The process took more than 15 years for penicillin, which I discuss in a previous column. A vaccine for meningitis took nearly a century to bring to market, and researchers are still working to solve Ebola and AIDS.

People won’t wait that long, which the cellphone tracking shows. But rather than showing flexibility and understanding, the response has been punishment and censorship.

One state even sent Child Protective Services after a desperate mother who defied the governor and reopened her business. Meanwhile, Google has started blocking dissenting voices on YouTube. One video, which argued against the lockdown orders, accumulated 1.3 million views before getting pulled down. Now, it can be found only at the American Institute for Economic Research.

Taken together, the above fallacies are putting many individuals in untenable positions. Smart leaders recognize that the road to recovery requires adherence to sound leadership principles.

They offer customized solutions instead of generalities, guidelines instead of mandates, rational modeling instead of fuzzy math, holistic approaches instead of compartmentalized thinking, coordinated experimentation instead of unilateral decisions, and continuous course correction instead of rigidity.