Greg Cochran blogs briefly at West Hunter; the meat is in the comments. On his COVID-19 post yesterday, Free Parameter, he made a passing reference to the rabbit disease myxomatosis, a.k.a. white blindness, which inspired a commenter to compare our SARS reactions to the rabbit military dictatorship of Efrafra in Watership Down:
Woundwort thinks that the white blindness is a disease used by humans to harm rabbits (shades of how some think COVID-19 is a Chinese-made weapon), so he tries to stop it by keeping his rabbits underground, out of human sight.It is left to the reader to draw the obvious parallels to SARS-CoV-2.
Although his theory’s off, his measures would limit Efrafra’s exposure to natural reservoirs of myxomatosis. [...]
[But] he’s too strict, too cruel. No Efrafran rabbit will report feeling sick, because they’ll be punished. And if they did, their Owsla officer would likely try to keep it a secret, for the same reason. White blindness will become deeply entrenched at Efrara before Woundwort even knows it’s there.
That’s the irony of being a totalitarian dictator: you want obedient underlings, but instead you get skilled liars. To fight disease you need clear information about where it began and how far it’s spread, and Woundwort has set up an incentive structure that ensures he’ll never get it.
A real-life parallel happened in 2002, when SARS broke out in Guangdong in China. The province had a 12% economic growth target to hit, come hell or high water, and “negative news” was suppressed by the state. As a result, the disease snowballed and became far more devastating than it had to be.
Like the weekly data, Massachusetts' daily numbers are now coming out later, in perpetuity. While we wait, here's last week's long-awaited map, with a notable increase in the orangeness of the percent change panel (showing the area of increasing case counts):
(Pop out.)
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up two thirds of a percentage point today.
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