COVID-19 Lessons: The Cost of Half Measures

There is so much to be learned from the entirely botched handling of the COVID-19 crisis. There are lessons about markets compared to command-and-control, wartime versus peacetime institutions, decision making under uncertainty, scientific progress and much more. I am likely to write a post about each of these, starting with today’s installment: the cost of half measures.

Let’s start with the observation that most people still don’t seem to understand exponential growth (another lesson right here). Any transmission rate R > 1 results in exponential growth. Sure, R = 1.2 is not as fast as R = 1.8 but it is still exponential which means that eventually infections start to really add up. Here is some simple math: 1.8 ^ 10 = 357 whereas 1.2 ^ 10 = 6. So 1.8 seems to be much much worse. But if you turn the question around for a moment you see the problem quite quickly, how long to get to 357 with R = 1.2? Naively you might approach this as 357/6 = 60x slower, but in reality 1.2 ^ 32 = 341 and 1.2 ^ 33 = 410, so you get to the same level of infection at only 3.2x to 3.3x slower!

This is exactly what we are seeing play out in most countries. We never got R < 1 sustained because we took half measures. Instead we simply reduced R but stayed in exponential growth territory. We were buying time, but because of the exponential nature of viral growth not nearly as much time as one might naively expect. Of course we then proceeded to mostly waste the time that we had bought by not using it to widely deploy masks, testing and tracing, which are the measures that could have helped us push to R < 1. Here too instead of getting our act together we applied half measures (at best).

So yes, when faced with exponential growth, half measure simply don’t cut it. Eventually (and that eventual isn’t that long) the growth catches up with you. And that’s how we find ourselves yet again in a situation where in some places, such as Los Angeles, ICUs are over capacity.

There is an analogy here with a phenomenon in startups. If you are running out of money as a startup, cutting a bit is not good enough if you are still going to run out of money. It doesn’t matter if you are out of money a month or two later than you would otherwise be. You need to cut to the point where you either can get to profitability or back to fundability (what constitutes fundability depends on the scale of your company, the strength of your investor syndicate and more).