‘Freedom Day’, Incentives, and What Comes Next

As of Monday 19 July, England has taken another step out of lockdown and into ‘freedom’, with nightclubs allowed to reopen, outdoor events allowed to go ahead, and all social distancing rules and national mask mandates dropped. At the same time, our daily case rate is among the highest in the world: on 19 July, we reported 39,538 new cases, and our seven-day average case rate stands at 564.23 per one million people at the time of writing.*

From Our World in Data.

As you’d imagine, this has caused a lot of uncertainty. Muddled government messaging has not helped matters, with ministers promoting the notion of ‘freedom day’ from one side of their mouths while speaking the scolding language of ‘personal responsibility’ from the other. There has been a lot of coverage of this, from people with a lot more knowledge and experience than me. One thing I think is sometimes missed, though, is the role of incentives in determining what happens next. In this article, I’ll outline the logic of ‘freedom day’, run through the different incentives as I see them, and try to make some predictions for what comes next.

What is the Strategy Here?

Leaving aside political considerations for a second, there does appear to be some method to the apparent madness.

The government’s decision to press ahead with ‘freedom day’ appears to rest on several key assumptions:

• COVID-19 is not a serious illness for most younger people who are not clinically vulnerable.
• The vaccines are effective in limiting transmission and preventing many cases of COVID-19 from becoming serious.
• Enough of the older and vulnerable populations have been vaccinated to protect significant numbers of them from catching COVID-19 from the unvaccinated.

The decision to lift restrictions now rather than later similarly rests on a few assumptions:

• As children are in general not eligible to get vaccinated, they are a potential vector of transmission. Children gather in large numbers at schools, and potentially spread the virus to teachers and parents or guardians. As schools are now closed for summer, there is less risk of child-to-adult transmission now than there would be in the autumn, when schools reopen.
• Non-COVID-19 illnesses are less likely to circulate in the summer. This means that hospitals will be more able to absorb an increase in COVID hospitalisations now than in the autumn, or especially in the winter, when we can expect flu to circulate.

The aim, then, is to allow the virus to circulate among the unvaccinated, who are unlikely to become seriously ill anyway. Transmission will be limited by the vaccines, and those most at risk of becoming seriously ill will be most protected.

But wait …

Is this Just ‘Herd Immunity’ Again?

Kind of. It depends how you look at it. In the disastrous early days of the pandemic, the UK government pursued a strategy of ‘herd immunity’.** Ministers backtracked once it became clear that this strategy would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

So how is this any different?

The answer lies in the success of the vaccination programme. The total number of injections administered now stands at over 80 million. This figure includes 37.29 million people ‘fully vaccinated’*** against COVID-19, with another 9.3 million partially vaccinated. Nearly 90% of the adult population has some protection against COVID, and around 70% is classed as sufficiently protected.

These numbers are impressive. Questions remain, however, over precisely how much protection each vaccine gives. Thankfully, all the ones currently available seem quite effective at preventing serious illness, hospitalisation, and death among those who catch COVID.

With this in mind, the government’s strategy becomes clearer: thanks to the vaccines, the virus will be able to spread through the population in a far more benign way, causing fewer deaths and posing less risk of overwhelming the NHS with hospitalisations. Those who are not vaccinated will acquire natural immunity, and COVID-19 will find itself without a pool of vulnerable people among which to spread.

Still, there are some significant uncertainties.

• First, we still know very little about so-called ‘long COVID’.**** It is possible that the virus may still cause serious and long-lasting harm to even the ‘fully vaccinated’.
• Second, we do not know how well the vaccines limit transmission in a real-world setting without additional restrictions. The margin for error is tight, and it is possible that the NHS may still find itself overwhelmed with moderate-to-severe cases of COVID-19.
• Third and finally, we cannot know what sort of variants this high level of transmission may produce. We might find that our vaccines are simply selecting for more aggressive mutations of the virus — ones able to overcome the protection offered by vaccines.*****

The government is undoubtedly taking a risk with ‘freedom day’, then. There is a logic to the strategy, but it is far from foolproof.

Of course, all these numbers don’t necessarily give us much guide to what comes next …

What Happens Next?

My general position when it comes to COVID-19 is that it is nearly impossible to accurately predict UK government actions based on a rational assessment of data.******

A man considering, for perhaps the first time, that his actions might have consequences.

Instead, I prefer to base my predictions on an analysis of the incentives that matter to the different decisionmakers involved. Of course, my perception of those incentives might be way off. But, based on the experience of the last year, I propose that it’s better to proceed on the following assumptions about the key individuals and groups:

• Boris Johnson does not in fact care about personal liberty. Despite his past blatherings about identity cards,******* he has no principled objections to restrictions on individual liberty.
• Rishi Sunak has no intentions to spend any more money than he absolutely needs to.
• Few if any governments would voluntarily give up sweeping powers to act free from parliamentary scrutiny. Given the current government’s authoritarian instincts,******** we should not expect any special deference to parliamentary sovereignty and democratic scrutiny.
• The media seeks engagement, in whatever form that takes. On the whole, the media will continue to focus on case numbers, so long as those numbers are either extraordinarily high or extraordinarily low. Additional context may be provided in articles or analysis, but the headlines will remain the same.
• All governments have at least some interest in maintaining popularity and avoiding negative press.
• The business community cares about making money. It will call for compensation for isolating or unwell workers only to the extent that it needs to to protect its own financial interests.
• The workers’ community, such as it exists, is divided, declassed, and functionally powerless. Its erstwhile political home, the Labour party, has shown itself unable and unwilling to advocate for workers’ interests.
• The public health community enjoys the increased attention it has received during the pandemic. Individual scientists enjoy being profiled in newspapers and magazines and interviewed on TV shows, radio, and online. They take pride in their work and believe that it is genuinely beneficial, perhaps even necessary to society.

Given these incentives, I believe we can make the following predictions:

• The government will avoid instituting another lockdown until as late as possible.
• In the absence of restrictions, the government will continue to scold members of the public over ‘personal responsibility’.
• The media will continue to present high case numbers as a crisis.
• The public health community will be loath to give up its newfound prestige. Scientists will continue to err on the side of caution, and play up the threat posed by the virus.
• The Treasury will hold off on providing more support until and unless it becomes untenable for businesses to operate without such support. If and when businesses start to suffer from the continued effects of COVID-19 on the workforce, the government will reintroduce some form of support, likely in the tried and tested form of furlough payments, which ultimately serve to keep businesses afloat while offsetting the worst consequences for workers.

Accordingly, I suspect that we will see the return of at least some COVID-19 restrictions by late autumn, say November or December. In the absence of a ‘nightmare’ variant (ie. one that avoids vaccines or causes significantly more deaths), these restrictions will be modest, and will take the form of limits on economically unproductive activities such as informal gatherings in private spaces, along with some modest support for businesses to continue employing their workers. The government will not signal an ‘all-clear’ until sometime next year (2022), most likely over the summer, and will seek to retain as many of its expanded powers as possible until and beyond then.

***

This was something of a different post for me. I hope that it has proved enlightening, and I look forward to seeing how well these predictions hold up in a year or two. More than this, I welcome engagement, and I would love to hear from those with more knowledge than me on these topics. Please do get at me on Twitter, or comment below.

Footnotes

*We may consider it a somewhat foreboding sign that the prime minister only recently finished self-isolating, as Downing Street alone appears to face more active COVID-19 cases than some countries.

**The government still occasionally tries to deny that it ever considered herd immunity as a policy. This is despite numerous public figures either using the term explicitly or invoking the idea implicitly, in full public view, in early March 2020. This BBC piece gives some detail, though it is characteristically deferent to the government’s preferred version of events — or, as we used to call it, to the government’s lie.

***Most currently available COVID-19 vaccinations require two shots to reach their reported level of efficacy. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine requires only one shot, and was approved for use in the UK in May, but is not currently available. The term ‘fully vaccinated’ may be slightly misleading, as it seems clear that most will need some sort of a booster shot in the autumn, but the term is overwhelmingly preferred across the media and political spheres, so I shall continue to use it here.

****‘Long COVID’ is one of the longest-lasting and most worrying unknowns of the pandemic, and few sources seem to have much understanding of it. The NHS page on the topic provides a laundry list of symptoms and not much else. Research continues, but we are still struggling even to identify known unknowns.

*****While the prospect of a fully vaccine-resistant, deadlier variant is truly a nightmare scenario, we should remember that it is also an ever-present one. Even at their best, lockdowns cannot restrict transmission to zero.

******Apologies to anyone who has read my intensely nerdy analysis of the numbers so far. And, indeed, to anyone who continues to read these footnotes.

*******Much as I hate to admit it, I actually agree with the argument as put forward in this piece. Thankfully, Boris Johnson clearly does not believe a word that he wrote, as even the Spectator reluctantly concedes.

********Simply look up the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill for evidence of the current government’s authoritarianism. If this is somehow not enough, consider the government’s repeated flirting with breaking international law over Brexit.