More on the trust deficit

I have written elsewhere on the problems that arise as trust is eroded. Another example reared its ugly head in recent days. Trump's distrust of what he calls the "deep state" (and reasonable people call the civil service) meant that he didn't trust the advice they were giving him.

On February 23rd asymptomatic contagion was picked up by Dr. Robert Kadlec, the top disaster response official at the Health and Human Services Department from earlier work by a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This, above all, should have set alarm bells ringing, since it meant that covid-19's propagation could not be tracked through the identification and isolation of those who had been taken sick; by that time many others would already have been infected.

But Kadlec's attempts and those of others to convince the Trump administration that there was a serious problem fell of deaf ears. Trump's distrust of "experts" (which may be a reflection of his self-image as "a very stable genius" who knows better than everyone else, or simply that he only trusts those who he perceives are Trump loyalists - or both, of course) ultimately led to at least three weeks of delay before the administrating changed course and recommended serious social distancing mitigation recommendations. And that delay cost lives, as these simple models illustrate.

The delay could have caused the initial peak to be almost five times larger than it would have been had the administration acted in a timely fashion. Using a simple assumption of a constant ratio of death to infections, prompt action would have saved, to this point, over six thousand lives in New York alone, and fifteen thousand for the country. And that's before the virus's spread has been contained; there will be more fatalities in the seeks to come, most of which could have been avoided with prompt action.

Moreover, this estimate of lives that could have been saved could be conservative; it assumes that fatalities rise in proportion to the number of cases, but when the health care system is overloaded as arguably it may well have been in New York, at the margin the mortality rate is higher. So, a trust deficit has real consequences other than imposing search cost. Not paying attention to experts can be fatal, as Trump appears to so ably demonstrated.