I am a Bullshit Artist
And that is why you should listen to me right now about COVID-19
Hi, my name is Nick, and I’m a Bullshit Artist.
I say that with pride. It is a massively powerful skillset, and I’m very good at it. It’s not a particular distinction or an inborn talent. I was educated at a north London public school which produces Bullshit Artists of considerable attainment and fluency, and then at Cambridge University, which is famous for producing the kinds of Bullshit Artists who make some of the UK’s funniest comedy.
Please note that this is not a side product. It is the main event. At fourteen I was told it was time to start thinking about bullshit seriously as a life skill. “Sooner or later, an examiner or a job interviewer will ask you a question to which you do not know the answer. There are no points for saying ‘I don’t know.’” At the time, incidentally, this was somewhat true, and in many situations it still is.
I was taught how to fake an answer, and encouraged to develop a sophisticated system for doing so. At the same time, I learned how to absorb large amounts of information from various sources (in my case, lectures are the least useable source, the rate of transmission being slow and retention being dependent on the skill and wit of the lecturer) and fit them into pre-existing webs of understanding so that I can regurgitate them at need as part of an ontology. Finally, I learned how to adjust a model rapidly with new information, and therefore how to sound as if something I learned five minutes ago is the basis of my entire understanding, and to imply — very politely — that you should already have realised that. I learned to gaslight large groups, not crudely and malevolently but very subtly, so that they would accept that my knowledge is deep when it is hollow. If you do all this with a light enough touch you can sit down opposite an actual expert, draw information from them as you go, and feed enough superficially-related detail and fast-fail inference into the mix that they will believe more and more firmly as the conversation continues that you are a surprisingly well-educated layperson — a lie you can cap by admitting gracefully when the opportunity arises that you’ve reached the edge of your abililty and would they please go into greater detail, at which any further re-branded repetition you come out with passes for casual brilliance. You deceive, self-educate, camouflage and flatter all at the same time, and believe me: it works.
That’s just my general bullshit background – and part of the toolkit of my actual profession. In the specific, I am a student of Social and Political Science, the brilliant and genuinely important mishmash degree offered by Cambridge as a reply to the more traditional Oxford PPE. SPS is an interdisciplinary discipline, a deliberate hybrid programme. When I was there it was composed of twenty six potential modules, of which you must select six. These can range from classic social theory and economics to psychology and criminology, media theory and Russian twentieth century history. The task is to bind together what you learn into something that actually tells you a coherent story. You can do that, or you can blow it off. The examiners will never know. They grade papers, not courses.
In other words, I am a mirror image of Boris Johnson’s cabinet. You should listen to me not because I’m an expert on COVID-19, or government, but because my baseline ignorance is appallingly close to theirs, and I have many of the same skills and weaknesses.
Yeah, self-own. I’m not happy about this comparison either. In fact, let me add to that: I hate writing these pieces. I cannot tell you how much I hate them. Why? Because they require me to fill the part of my brain which I use to do my professional work — accepting and extending a given premise along a given future trajectory — with horrible possibilities. It’s like a rocket ship to the nightmare planet. I would SO much rather sit around and play Jedi: Fallen Order or bake bread or boop my son on the nose. I don’t get paid for this and I tend to get grief. But I feel an obligation, because it seems that my evil twins, having fought like ferrets in a sack for the jobs they now occupy, don’t actually want to do them, so — and this is where we evidently part company — they’re just not doing them.
All right, then. Everyone NOT Boris Johnson or one of his fellow Horsemen of the Upcockalypse, here we go. The next section is the information splurge I’m working with.
(If it’s TL;DR for you, go directly to the final bit, which is where I put everything into Bullshit Artist terms: short, declarative, and quotable. I just need you to see the working, because I am a Bushit Artist working against type: I’m trying to make my line of bullshit follow the curve of the truth. And that is hard.)
Prologue: on 12th March, I wrote that I thought the government was screwing up its COVID-19 response. I’d been worried for longer, but hadn’t had time to put it into words. Some time before that — I’m not sure when — I’d created a Twitter list of epidemiologists, virologists and public health experts around the world, and I’d been reading it. The reviews of the UK’s position ranged from “that’s bold” to “these people are fucking insane and they will lose hundreds of thousands of lives”. Most of them were closer to the latter, and the general trend was “they’re ignoring the science”. The government, of course, claimed to be following “the science”, but had selected quite narrowly to achieve an impression of unanimity. There have been powerful journalistic efforts since to identify what was going on. (1, 2) The verdict has been damning.
The UK went into lockdown on 23rd March — astonishingly late, to the eyes of many around the world — and now has the highest death toll (and death rate) in Europe. Boris Johnson’s government is fond of referencing a Guardian article from 30th April on the difficulty of comparing statistics across countries because of differing data methods and cateogories, as if it was a get-out-of-jail-free card on this score. However…
This is the trouble with being a Bullshit Artist in a joined up world. There’s a lot of noise and traffic and you can hide from plenty of things, but the higher you rise, the further your voice carries, the more likely people are to connect the dots and realise you’re not only talking nonsense, but using their knowledge to do it — and when they object, that too carries. As it should. The view from abroad is uncompromising. We are the idiot of Europe.
So the question is what happens now?
What should happen?
What should happen is tolerably easy to say, if hard to execute. Professor Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University, who at the 2018 Hay Festival predicted a pandemic similar to COVID-19, has tirelessly listed the necessary steps:
to aggressively identify where the virus is and break chains of transmission
to protect health and social care workers
to keep constant surveillance of the virus using tracking systems
[monitor] borders for imported cases
clear and honest communication
[recognise] that any “exit” strategy is not like a switch that means life will go back to pre-Covid days
[and that] lockdowns, if introduced early and quickly, can slow the spread of the virus, but are not a solution by themselves
[and that] all of the above are short-term strategies while countries await key scientific findings
[to] ensure that countries keep daily new cases low and avoid a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic
It must be exhausting and frustrating to spend so much time being both right and ignored.
The R Number and what it means…
In essence: the lockdown is a tool to stop the virus burning through the population leaving only ash. It’s not a solution, and it has problematic consequences of its own. You use it to drive down the number of new cases per day and the notorious R number so that you can test, trace and contain it and life can go back — or perhaps more accurately onwards — to some cautious pandemic version of normality. But you have to be careful, because if your R number goes above 1, then the virus is winning again.
Here’s Angela Merkel explaining what that means for Germany...
And here’s what that looks like on a graph:
Germany hits the target — controllable levels of infection — by 1st June 2020, and can therefore start to ease its lockdown, very cautiously. There’s a relationship, obviously (when you think about it) between how tight your lockdown is, and how long you have to keep it in place. Tight lockdown, short lockdown. Loose lockdown, long lockdown.
I had a quick chat on Twitter with Thomas Viehmann, who created the graph above, and he kindly did one for the UK, guessing our R number was in the .9 range. I can’t find anyone willing to commit to an R number for the UK, but since our new cases per day are still pretty stable, I’m guessing that’s about right — or was two weeks ago. Thing is — unscientifically — when I look out of my window today, there’s more traffic than there was then, not less, so if that subjective snapshot is indicative (and I live on a cut-through road which gets a lot of commuter traffic, so it’s not a totally stupid metric) the R number is likely to be higher than it was at the end of April.
Soooo… the software gummed up the dateline at the bottom, but here’s the kicker: that last date is August… in 2021.
Because we didn’t want to lock down in the first place, we haven’t really locked down the way other states have. We’ve taken a relatively relaxed approach to “essential” reasons to leave the house, and so on. Our downslope is veeeeeery shallow. It may not be getting the job done.
I don’t know, because no one seems to be able to say what the R number actually is now.
Because we’re not testing.
And the government isn’t communicating.
What actually seems to be happening…
Boris Johnson was talking about easing restrictions this weekend, and some newspapers are reporting having schools start to go back as early as late May or early June.
Sounds a bit bold, doesn’t it? And indeed here’s the Scottish government on the topic of schools:
In Denmark, a study recently found a .3 hike in the R number after reopening schools. If our number is any higher than .7, then that obviously puts it above the line, and infections start going back up. Thing is, our base of cases is still relatively high — that’s what the hard green line in Viehmann’s graphs is about.
Never mind the two hundred thousand-odd already infected: assume they are perfectly quarantined (which they’re not, and of course there are more than that, because we haven’t been testing anything like enough to know how many cases we actually have). Take 6000 cases as your starting point — assume that on Monday they were the only infectious people in the country. The WHO puts the novel coronavirus’s R0 at 2–2.5. You’re back in the badlands of hundreds of thousands of cases in a terrifyingly short period of time. You already know what that graph looks like, because you’ve been seeing it since March. In fact, since 22nd March, the day before lockdown, when the UK had 5,683 cases. It took until 16th April to reach 103,093.
If we ease the lockdown prematurely, with levels of infection in the community too high, we’ll have another peak on our hands and tens of thousands more people will die.
So, in Bullshit Artist terms, how do you exit lockdown?
Bullet points! Graphics! Soundbites!
The right words in the right order.
Because my skillset — communication — is not virology or epidemiology, but that does not mean it is not important in this context.
Get the numbers down to a manageable level. That means a few hundred, nationwide. Certainly no more than a few thousand. If you think that’s impossible, you need to check your assummptions — you’re so used to being in one of the worst countries on Earth for COVID-19 that you’ve lost track of the possible. That is what other countries are aiming at. There are countries on this planet with populations larger than ours that have almost no cases. Chancellor Merkel says she wants to trace every single case in Germany. That’s the level of her ambition: Every. Single. Case.
Then you need testing, and not just capacity but local availability, appropriate deployment, testing people who aren’t in the front line and aren’t even symptomatic, as well as those who are. The more people you test, the more likely you are to catch asymptomatic carriers before they infect others, and indeed there may be tests now which catch infections very early — even early enough that an anti-viral drug, working to prevent reproduction of the virus within the body, could have a really powerful effect.
You also need contact tracing. That’s humans, doing interviews with anyone infected and finding out who they’ve been close to, as well as electronic tracing. It’s a skillset. We need to train people in it, fund them, protect them, and get them out there to do it. Digital tracing is great, but not everyone has a smartphone, and the government’s present approach to digital tracing is beyond useless anyway, and veering into the realms of actively problematic.
With these in place, and with a mechanism for quarantining positive cases which is simultaneously effective and sensitive to the needs of individual people, you can begin to reopen cautiously, with clear communication that this is not the end of the pandemic, nor even the beginning of it: that we still need to wash our hands, stay 2m away from one another, stay clear of large gatherings, and so on. And you keep your foot on the brake. If you get even a sniff of exponential growth, the shutters have to come down again fast. Because:
Since, in economic terms, shuttering the economy twice is probably worse than shuttering it once for longer, you have to be right the first time. You can’t go early, or you get screwed twice.
In the end, all of this is stopgap. It’s not about winning. The victory takes place elsewhere, in the labs where the vaccine is developed and the therapeutics are created. We don’t win this with lockdown — but we can lose it with opening up too soon.
But if you’re a Bullshit Artist, that kind of nuance is a real problem. If bullshit is all you’ve got to call on, you have to stay upbeat, lively, confident. Otherwise the crowd wanders off and leaves you alone on the stage, and that is where you can (figuratively) die — or lose the next election.
If we go too soon, we lose the country twice. We lose lives, and we lose the economy when we shut down again.
So don’t let the Horsemen of the Upcockalypse sell you a sweet summer story about picnics and hugs if they can’t also show you the tech, the PPE, the tracing and the manageable level of infection. Don’t let the press fob you off with Neil Ferguson’s love life when you should be seeing the UK as the worst-hit nation on this continent. Demand better. Make them put substance behind the shiny, twenty four hour correspondence course science-patter they dish out, and the reassuring nonsense.
And remember that, of the two people in this clip, one is a front line healthcare doctor, and the other is a graduate of Oxford University with a qualification in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
So here’s my message to you, the whole point of this long piece I didn’t really want to write:
If I can work all this out from available sources and the Twitter list I created a few weeks ago to understand the pandemic from the mouths (keyboards) of experts around the world, they should be able to as well. If they take us out of lockdown too early — and that’s what they seem to be proposing to do — it is not because they did not have the opportunity or the skills to understand. The tens of thousands of people in the UK who have already died are not dead because any of this was unknowable. I knew it in mid-March, from a standing start, without the benefit of a committee.
If they get this wrong, it is because they are the worst British government ever. And that is how you should remember them.
