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The Domino Effect
by Sven Nilsen, 2022
The 26th January this year, the Prime Minister of Denmark declared that COVID-19 was no longer a society threatening disease.
What follows, is an incredible “domino effect” of policy changes around the world to lift restrictions, that were put in place in order to keep the number of infections low under the pandemic.
As a mathematical language designer, I find this development both fascinating and terrifying.
To understand why politicians risk such a gamble, one must first understand the principle of sick leave. Sick leave is paid time off from work that workers can use to stay home to address their health needs without losing pay.
By lifting restrictions on isolation due to COVID-19, employers can reduce the cost of paying workers sick leave.
Needless to say, companies do not like to spend money that otherwise could be turned into profit.
The rest of the story in the news is basically sugaring it up to make it acceptable to most people.
You have probably heard these arguments:
- The number of people in ICUs are going down under the Omicron variant
- Vaccines reduces the risk of fatality and long-COVID disease
- We have to learn to “live with COVID”
These arguments might be true to some extent, but it does not make sense to reduce the mandatory time in isolation. Doing so is just helping the virus to spread.
Unless, of course, you do not like to pay for those extra days of safety.
With other words, the rephrasing of the pandemic as a non-threatening disease, is primarily in order to reduce costs of sick leave.
Within a few weeks, several countries, including my own (Norway), chose to follow Denmark in lifting restrictions.
Do we know enough about the virus to tell whether this is a good idea or not?
This is hard to answer, because we can not predict how the virus will mutate or spread, or its fatality rate. Lifting restrictions is an economic gamble that is more motivated by politics than science.
The “domino effect” comes from a game theoretic phenomena, that when a neighboring country is willing to take this gamble, it is much more likely to take that bet on your own.
Maybe it is a good idea for countries like Denmark or Norway, but what about the rest of the world? The more countries that lift restrictions, the more pressure is put on those who don’t.
Thus, the gamble spreads faster in the world than the virus itself ever did!
Let’s hope this goes well, because if it doesn’t, it might already be too late. This is a great example of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
It requires much less energy to make the domino bricks fall, when they stand in a certain pattern, than to put them back up.