19 min listen
On this week's Audio Reads, Douglas Murray advises Labour to get a new attack line, now that the Conservatives have become the party of the NHS. Professor Paul Dolan, a behavioural scientist at the LSE, ponders what would have happened had the pandemic started in Sweden, rather than China. And Andrew Watts says - if Brexit talks are scuppered because of fish, shouldn't Brits at least eat more of it?
Schools might never have closed in the first place had the coronavirus not started in China. Imagine it had started in Sweden. Whoever responded first was going to set the tone for the nations that followed. When we are uncertain about what to do, we look to the behaviour of others to guide us. Imagine walking down a street with a new restaurant on either side (you remember restaurants, right?), and that you do not know anything about either of them. One has some customers inside, the other has none. Assuming you can get a table, you would choose the one with people in it because, in the absence of any prior knowledge about the restaurants, other people provide you with a signal about which to eat in.
Covid-19 is a public health crisis. At least, this is what the doctors, epidemiologists and clinicians who command the air waves are telling us. They’re right, of course. But it isn’t only that: it’s an economic and social crisis too – and yet social scientists have hardly been heard from. They don’t seem to be influencing policy that much either. When the UK government says its decisions are guided by the science, they appear to be referring only to the science of transmission of the virus and its direct consequences for health. And even health is narrowly defined here: as mortality risks in the next few months. The only graphs that typically appear at news conferences are those relating to the number of infections and deaths.
