29 april

nonlinearity, failing principles and COVID19

In our years of broken ideologies there are few, very few principles that survive. The ones that do, are fairly stable. The core idea of liberalism is one of those. If you behave in your own profit, without harming anybody, everybody is better off. It is actually a nice idea on which most of our societies are founded. We have defined with all what does it means to harm somebody else, so we know the boundaries to respect when acting in our own benefit. And that not only improve ourselves, but the community at large. A sweet deal.

But what if even such idea would turn our to be wrong? 

Take past sunny weekends in Utrecht and Amsterdam. Or my strolling today, a fairly rainy day, in Utrecht. The city is back from the fear and desolation. To walk around is like walking a saturday midday: everybody is out, the terraces are full, many people sits at the channels to talk and enjoy the mutual company. It is all good and COVID19 seems to have disappeared from our awareness.  

Yet we are still in the middle of a pandemic. 

Interesting in the lively Utrecht of the previous days is that if you would be going out with 1,5 meters stick, you would realize that most people is actually keeping reasonable distance from each other. Indeed what I see happens in the open spaces of the cities, were experiments and measurements tells us that contagion is extremely unlikely, when keeping the distance. So what’s the problem? each of us are acting in our own interest: we are keeping the magic 1,5. So we are together, the economy of the town is churning again, and all is good what ends good, right? 

Wrong. 

Anybody that has some understanding of air borne pathogens and observe what has been going on in Utrecht in the last days knows that contagions are going to flourish like crazy. Perhaps the amount of people vaccinated will balance all this, perhaps not. But the key observation remains: that many people in the street is not good for anybody. The good individual behavior is screwing us all, and consequently, is screwing each of us. How could this be happening? 

The technical reason here is that the thumb rule of 1,5 meter of separation has been calculated measuring aerosol spread between two persons. What we have done is to extrapolate that simple measurement to a real situation, the one in which not only two persons are exhalating, but hundreds. The wind makes unlikely that pathogens airborne from one person further than 1,5 meter will reach you. But when there is not only one persons at this distance, but several, or actually hundreds of persons at many distances, the possibility of you being contagiated tends to the certainty. And so, the right behaviour of many is the wrong behavior of the mass. Could this (nonlinear in technical parlance) effect undermine our good old trusted liberal principle? I am not sure, so I will leave the possibility here.

Floating in the air.