Why are we suffering through such a terrible Covid-19 pandemic? Why did the rulers of the world react to it differently than we expected?

 "Tufekci describes herself as a “systems thinker.” She tries to learn about systems, and think about how they interact with one another. For instance, she studied authoritarian systems, and one rule for understanding them is that “you want to look at what they do and not what they say,” she said. So when China, after downplaying the severity of the virus early on, locked down Wuhan, she took it seriously.

“If a country like China is closing down a city of 11 million,” she told me, “this is a big deal. It is spreading, it is deadly, and we’re going to get hit.” Even then, many public health experts in the United States thought the Chinese were wrong, or lying, when they warned that the virus was spreading through asymptomatic transmission. But Tufekci knew that authoritarian systems tend to hide internal problems from the rest of the world. Only a true emergency would force them to change their public messaging. “There’s a principle called the principle of embarrassment,” she explained. “If a story is really embarrassing to the teller, they might be telling the truth.”

Here are a few other frameworks Tufekci told me she finds helpful:

    Herding effects. Public health experts — including figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci who are lauded today — were slow to change guidance on disruptive measures like masking and travel bans. That led to a cascade of media failures that reflected what journalists were hearing from expert sources. One reason Tufekci was willing to challenge that consensus was she saw experts as reflecting social pressure, not just empirical data. “The players in the institution look at each other to decide what the norm is,” she said. The problem is social frameworks “have a lot of inertia to them,” because everyone is waiting for others to break the norm. That cost precious time in this crisis.

    Thinking in exponents. The difficulty of exponential growth, as in the fable of the chessboard and the wheat, is that early phases of growth are modest and manageable, and then, seemingly all of a sudden, tip into numbers that are shocking in size — or, in this case, viral spread that is catastrophic in its scale. “My original area of study is social media,” Tufekci said, and that’s another area where the math tends to be exponential. This was, she said, a reason some in Silicon Valley were quick to see the danger of the virus. “A lot of venture capitalism, the VC world and the software people, they’re looking for that next exponential effect … so they had some intuition because of the field they were in.”

    Population versus individual. In clinical medicine, Tufekci said, “we tend to really think about individual outcomes rather than public health and what we need at the population level.” But thinking at the population level changes the situation dramatically. For instance, a test with a high rate of false positives may be a terrible diagnostic tool for a doctor’s office. But if it could be done cheaply, and repeatedly, and at home, it could be a very useful tool for a population because it would give people a bit more information at a mass scale. Thinking in individual terms versus public health terms is, Tufekci said, why the Food and Drug Administration has been so resistant to approving rapid at-home antigen testing (though that is, at last, beginning to change)."