Social distancing fatigue

Part of the government’s current thinking on coronavirus seems to revolve around the idea that after a certain point, the public could become ‘fatigued’ at control measures, meaning they would become less and less effective. This, so it is argued, might justify postponing the implementation of social distancing measures to a later date. At the risk of becoming yet another non expert who should shut up about this, the underlying logic of this seems dubious, but I’ll try and reconstruct it as best as I can.

It’s true that some social distancing measures have to be delayed, as they can only effectively be implemented once you know where the mass of cases are (e.g restriction of travel to and from particularly affected areas). But some things can be done across the board (e.g school closures, banning large gatherings). So far as I can tell, these slow down infection rates irrespective of absolute numbers, provided there is some spreading to be reduced. Now, if you assumed that you could only implement social distancing measures for a short period of time, once, it might make sense to try and reserve this for the time you thought would be the peak (if nothing else to flatten the curve enough to help hospitals).  But this would be true if and only if measures carried out earlier did not prevent this high peak happening in the first place. The overall trajectory of the infection would have to be largely unaffected by earlier social distancing measures, just delayed.

This overall trajectory, presumably, would be the virus infecting a large enough proportion of the population for herd immunity to start kicking in and slowing down the rate of new infections. In other words, you basically have to assume that sooner or later, a very large part of the population is going to get infected and you can only implement social distancing measures for short time periods.

This seems like a rather bizarre position at a time that China and Korea seem to have managed to dramatically limit new cases to absolute numbers converging on something like 1/20,000 and 1/5000 of their respective populations. This seems to suggest that preventing large portions of the general population getting infected is very possible. Even if you don’t eradicate the infection entirely, extensive contact tracing and testing might well be enough to prevent the outbreak from ballooning again once numbers have been brought down through social distancing. But such measures would presumably only be possible if numbers were small. Even if you ended up with a bit of a cycle of lower and higher levels of social distancing measures, this would not need to be carried out in perpetuity, just until more effective treatment or vaccines were developed and mass produced.  

In effect, the logic behind delaying social distancing, if government statements are taken at face value, seem very shaky indeed. They are applying highly speculative behavioural science (can anyone find a citation that supports social distancing fatigue kicking in at specific time points?) in a way that even if true, require quite specific understandings of the spread of the disease which don’t seem to fit the pattern of what is occurring in countries with more rigorous social distancing measures. And that’s before we think about what ‘fatigue’ would actually result in (people can’t go to sports matches that aren’t happening, even if they want to). No other developed country has explicitly endorsed such a strategy, presumably because the risks are so asymmetric. If the government is right, they perhaps make things slightly easier in a very bad situation. But if they’re wrong, they will be the people who allowed the UK to see extremely widespread infections, when other countries avoided such an outcome.