Gut instinct

Winston Peters, disagreeing with the continued level 2 restrictions (via the Herald)

“Travelling around the South Island has reinforced that people are not observing social distancing in the absence of any registered or real threat of Covid-19 exposure since late April.

“Not because they are against the Government’s Covid-19 response, but because they have applied their own ‘common sense’ test to their risk of exposure to the virus.”

He’s probably right. But that’s the problem.

Our own commonsense understanding of risk is pretty good.  If you’re deciding how fast it’s safe to take a winding road in bad weather, you can do well with commonsense perceptions  (unless you’re drunk or 16, and even  then you’ll probably make it).  If you’re deciding about your personal COVID risk you don’t have as much specific experience to fall back on, but there has been advice around for months and you’ve been watching the daily case counts. So, again, probably yes. The risk is low tomorrow.

But that’s not the question.  We don’t have restrictions because the risk is high. We have them because any COVID transmission will make the risk increase, slowly at first, then faster and faster over time. Since there’s a lag of a week or two in seeing the consequences, things would look the same whether we have a  long  trail dribbling off into nothing, or  a second wave all across the country. I can’t tell the difference. You can’t tell the difference.  Even Siouxsie or Ashley can’t tell the  difference!  In one case, you all in the South Island  have another moderately restricted week; in the other,  you and we go back to lockdown at huge expense and inconvenience, and potentially a bunch of people die or become chronically ill.

Because  the risk is not an immediate and visible and individual one, but a delayed and invisible and community one, commonsense and experience just doesn’t work on its own.   I don’t know whether the decision to extend level 2 was correct or not, because I don’t have all the information and modelling. Mr Peters has seen months of the best scientific and economic advice the country has to offer. He may know. But he’s not arguing based on his special knowledge  but on general commonsense risk perception. That won’t tell you.