[tomxor]

> The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months [...] If there is a substantially more transmissive variant around, that will make it much harder to buy that time.

But which action? I can see two class of possible cause that do not entirely overlap in response: A singular cause such as a strain; or fluctuations as the emergent behavior of a complex dynamic system. If incorrectly attributed to a localised strain, efforts may be ineffectively focused on creating division between larger populations while removing the public's focus on the more evenly distributed measures we are already employing.

> You need to be able to act on the balance of probabilities, not wait for perfect information.

How about the probabilities between the two class of above cause? We seem to have an innate bias towards inferring 1:1 causal relationships which makes a strain feel like a simple and attractive explanation. This bias fails miserably in the face of dynamic systems where behavior cannot usually be attributed to a single variable... IANAV, but the spread of infectious disease is without a doubt a complex dynamic system from which a significant degree of unpredictable behavior must emerge.

To be honest this problem is not even particularly unique to this situation... The world is vast and complex, yet people usually want simple explanations - particularly for undesirable situations, something tangible to blame, a villain... The media continually exploit this desire and I cannot help but feel this is another example. A strain (real or not) makes for an excellent villain and story VS "chaos" which is extremely difficult for any reporter to spin an accessible narrative into.

[jsnell]

That seems like just a fancier way of expressing TWIV's "we can't possibly know anything without lab experiments that establish the exact mechanisms, so we should do nothing" philosophy.

The undeniable fact is that this variant has successfully replaced other already highly prevalent variants. That needs to be explained somehow.

Could it be a founder effect? No.

Could it be random chance? No. Of course a stochastic process could converge like this even with no selective advantage eventually. But the change has been too fast and too consistent in this case.

Could it be a super-spreading event? No. The change has been continuous, and a single event would cause just a step-change in relative prevalance.

Could it be the new variant being more transmissive, or having another similar selective advantage? Yes.

Could it be an unspecified emergent behavior? I guess it could. But how are we supposed to reason about something that vague? We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts, I feel that anyone proposing that it's just emergent behavior should be at least a little bit more specific.

[tomxor]

> how are we supposed to reason about something that vague? [...] I feel that anyone proposing that it's just emergent behavior should be at least a little bit more specific.

Sometimes it rains when we predicted it wouldn't, sometimes we get a full blown storm we didn't see coming... And that's using advanced techniques developed over decades on a continually available complex system for which there is demand to be able to predict on a daily basis. The very nature of these things is to have unpredictable behavior... That does not mean we necessarily do not understand the governing rules, but that the emergent behavior is not reducible into a simplified description.

> We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts

It's simple and correlated, but highly suspect when a significant degree of chaos adds massive error bars to the significance of that correlation.

[rimliu]

Do you have any arguments behind your "No."s?

[jsnell]

I think I gave arguments for all of the "No"s except for the founder effect, which I'd just discussed in another message of this thread so it seemed redundant to do that again.

Just how much detail were you hoping for?

[tailspin2019]

> But which action?

In the UK, my view is the action to take was very clearly to dial back the public's expectations of having a 5 day "free for all" period of relaxation of our restrictions over Christmas.

This 5 day period, as originally planned, was going to lead to massive cross-country travel, plenty of it being completely unnecessary, with no doubt a lot of risk taking in the spirit of "it's Christmas" and an inevitable huge spike of cases and deaths in the weeks that followed.

I mean I love Christmas, but I can cope with not having 5 days of partying for just one year... *

As it happens, the government did take action to dial this back at the very last minute to allow just 1 day of relaxed rules (Christmas Day) rather than the week that was originally on the table. In my view they should have been planning for this right from the start and they unnecessarily screwed up a lot of people's Christmas plans by leaving it until the very last minute to make this change.

Now even if the variant turns out to be a "non issue" (and we still have rising numbers anyway), I think it's better that they took this action to further limit Christmas (as tough as it is for everyone) rather than take the "wait and see" or "hope for the best" approach, both of which seem to have been UK govnt strategies at one time or another during 2020.

* I'm being slightly flippant here. This is clearly a tough time for a lot of people, and many families will be spending Christmas apart and will find this very hard for all sorts of reasons.

[Ntrails]

> This is clearly a tough time for a lot of people, and many families will be spending Christmas apart and will find this very hard for all sorts of reasons.

Honestly, I think people are being incredibly relaxed about the fact that lockdown restrictions are incredibly expensive to the mental health of swathes of the population. I am not claiming that letting covid kill more people would be better - but I wish there was more acknowledgement of the fact that it is a trade off, and that the goal is getting society in the best shape out the other side of this. Not just the largest one.

[tailspin2019]

Good point. It's a really difficult balance to strike.

[wokwokwok]

Don’t you think this reflects a bias in the opposite direction?

Systems are dynamic and complex, but that doesn’t make them unknowable. If complex systems were impossible to model science wouldn’t be a thing.

Sure, the “new variant” narrative is an easy one to pick up because it’s superficially understandable; but what other complex interactions are resulting in a new strain becoming dominant over an existing one?

Do we just sit on our hands and go, well gee, better do nothing? Guess it’s just too hard to know what to do at this point...

There is a typical government fallacy that to be seen doing something is better than nothing, even when it’s the wrong thing... I get it, that’s bad.

...but this is a case where doing nothing has been a colossal disaster so far; and it’s extremely clear what the result of doing nothing different will be if the new variant hypothesis is correct.

So it’s a risk game. Is the cost * probability of A vs B a better choice?

You’re saying the probability is not known at this point because systems are complicated.

So what? It’s still clear to me that it’s very likely that something is happening, even if exactly what it is, is unclear.

You can still build a risk matrix taking that into account.

[tomxor]

> Systems are dynamic and complex, but that doesn’t make them unknowable. If complex systems were impossible to model science wouldn’t be a thing.

Not quite. It can makes them unpredictable, not unknowable... more specifically it can make them computationally irreducible which means we cannot find a simplified description of their behavior without having to compute every step, even when we understand the underlying rules that govern them. In fact we often cannot model them very well, an easy every day example is the weather, which we desperately want to know, but our methods are a significant compromise - that may seem like an unfair analogy but it really isn't, the atoms of society may be fewer but they have far more dimensions and more complex individual interactions.

It doesn't always apply, even within the same medium, it depends on the context e.g predicting weather requires some kind of simulation of fluid and pressure, yet in a different, more narrow context it's not necessary to attempt simulating the underlying mechanisms in any way or form, instead the overall behavior can be simplified to a set of descriptive equations (Bernoulli's).

It's funny because this does touch on a core issue for science - we still mostly hold this traditional view of it based on a history of going after the more easily obtainable nuggets of behavior with nice manageable reducible descriptions, but we have been unwittingly selective.

> what other complex interactions are resulting in a new strain becoming dominant over an existing one?

It does not need to result in a new _variant_, this right here is the misunderstanding. These two things can happen and not be related.

[wokwokwok]

There is a logical fallacy referred to as the “red herring”; you do not fool me, or anyone, by using it.

The side points you make are irrelevant to the point at hand; rather than hand waving address the point at hand:

Why is this an excuse to do nothing?

If not, what action do you propose instead?

How do you justify it?

Be specific.

[tomxor]

I did not suggest doing nothing, please see my original comment.

[ianai]

Personally I’ve taken it to changing optimization tactics. I’m going to use pseudo-statistical language to illustrate my point so please try to be charitable. In a usual model I’d base my actions on the mean outcome for a given set of choices. For covid, I think it’s smarter to choose to minimize the maximum, worst outcome. Ie assume the absolute worst and react in the harshest way. This new strain may prove to be nothing major, but personally I’ve decided it’s wise to be even more distanced from possible disease vectors. I suspect this may be a good strategy in a universe in which an already rare occurrence has been observed, in a larger sense.

[GavinMcG]

> removing the public's focus on the more evenly distributed measures we are already employing

How is this focus "removed" and why is there any reason to think that evenly distributed measures along with targeted ones would be a problem for the public?

[xg15]

What would be your advice we should do in the face of a system so complex it's impossible to understand or predict?