Why I do not favor variolation for Covid-19
Robin Hanson makes the strongest case for variolation, here is one excerpt:
So the scenario is this: Hero Hotels welcome sufficiently young and healthy volunteers. Friends and family can enter together, and remain together. A cohort enters together, and is briefly isolated individually for as long as it takes to verify that they’ve been infected with a very small dose of the virus. They can then interact freely with each other, those those that show symptoms are isolated more. They can’t leave until tests show they have recovered.
In a Hero Hotel, volunteers have a room, food, internet connection, and full medical care. Depending on available funding from government or philanthropic sources, volunteers might either pay to enter, get everything for free, or be paid a bonus to enter. Health plans of volunteers may even contribute to the expense.
Do read the whole thing. By the way, here is “Hotel Corona” in Tel Aviv. Alex, by the way, seems to endorse Robin’s view. Here are my worries:
1. Qualified medical personnel are remarkably scarce right now. I do not see how it is possible to oversee the variolation of more than a small number of individuals. Furthermore, it is possible that many medical personnel would refuse to oversee the practice. The net result would be only a small impact on herd immunity. If you doubt this, just consider how bad a job we Americans have done scaling up testing and making masks.
The real question right now is what can you do that is scalable? This isn’t it.
I recall Robin writing on Twitter that variolation would economize on the number of medical personnel. I think it would take many months for that effect to kick in, or possibly many years.
2. Where will we put all of the Covid-positive, contagious individuals we create? What network will we use to monitor their behavior? We have nothing close to the test and trace systems of Singapore and South Korea.
In essence, we would have to send them home to infect their families (the Lombardy solution) or lock them up in provisional camps. Who feeds and takes care of them in those camps, and what prevents those individuals from becoming infected? What is the penalty for trying to leave such a camp? Is our current penal system, or for that matter our current military — both longstanding institutions with plenty of experienced personnel — doing an even OK job of overseeing Covid-positive individuals in their midst? I think not.
Under the coercive approach, what is the exact legal basis for this detention? That a 19-year-old signed a detention contract? Is that supposed to be binding on the will in the Rousseauian sense? Where are the governmental structures to oversee and coordinate all of this? Should we be trusting the CDC to do it? Will any private institutions do it without complete governmental cover? I don’t think so.
If all this is all voluntary, the version that Robin himself seems to favor, what percentage of individuals will simply leave in the middle of their treatment? Robin talks of “Hero Hotels,” but which actual hotels will accept the implied liability? There is no magic valve out there to relieve the pressure on actual health care systems. Note that the purely voluntary version of Robin’s plan can be done right now, but does it seem so popular? Is anyone demanding it, any company wishing it could do it for its workforce?
3. The NBA has an amazing amount of money, on-staff doctors, the ability to afford tests, and so on. And with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars at stake they still won’t restart a crowdless, TV-only season. They could indeed run a “Heroes Hotel” for players who got infected from training and play, and yet they won’t. “Stadium and locker room as Heroes Hotel” is failing the market test. Similarly, colleges and universities have a lot at stake, but they are not rushing to volunteer their dorms for this purpose, even if it might boost their tuition revenue if it went as planned (which is not my prediction, to be clear).
The proposal requires institutions to implement it, yet it doesn’t seem suited for any actual institution we have today.
4. Does small/marginal amounts of variolation do much good compared to simply a weaker lockdown enforcement for activities that involve the young disproportionately? Just tell the local police not to crack down on those soccer games out in the park (NB: I am not recommending this, rather it is the more practical version of what Robin is recommending; both in my view are bad ideas.) Robin’s idea has the “Heroes Hotel” attached, but that is a deus ex machina that simply assumes a “free space” (both a literal free space and a legally free space) is available for experimentation, which it is not.
5. Society can only absorb a small number of very blunt messages from its leaders. You can’t have the President saying “this is terrible and you all must hide” and “we’re going to expose our young” and expect any kind of coherent response. People are already confused enough from mixed messages from leaders such as presidents and governors.
6. There is still a chance that Covid-19 causes or induces permanent damage, perhaps to the heart and perhaps in the young as well. That does not militate in favor of increasing the number of exposures now, especially since partial protective measures (e.g., antivirals, antibodies) might arise before a vaccine does. This residual risk, even if fairly small, also makes the liability issues harder to solve.
7. The actual future of the idea is that as lockdown drags on, many individuals deliberately will become less careful, hoping to get their infections over with. A few may even infect themselves on purpose, one hopes with a proper understanding of dosage. One can expect this practice will be more popular with the (non-obese) young. The question is then how to take care of those people and how to treat them. That debate will devolve rather rapidly into current discussions of testing, test and trace, self-isolation, antivirals, triage, and so on. And then it will be seen that variolation is not so much of a distinct alternative as right now it seems to be.
8. The main benefit of variolation proposals is to raise issues about the rates at which people get infected, and the sequencing of who is and indeed should be more likely to get infected first. Those questions deserve much more consideration than they are receiving, and in that sense I am very happy to see variolation being brought (not much risk of it happening as an explicit proposal). That said, I don’t think Heroes Hotel, and accelerating the rate of deliberate, publicly-intended infection, is the way to a better solution.
Soon I’ll write more on what I think we should be doing, but I would not put explicit variolation above the path of the status quo.