The Risks of Swarmballing around COVID-19
By: W. Jon Windsor
Tags: Systems Thinking, Epidemiology, Risk, Covid 19 Pandemic, Inattentive Blindness

The Risks of Swarmballing around COVID-19

Coauthored with Evan Thomsen

COVID-19 Inattentive Blindness

Swarm Intelligence is the collective behavior of individual systems. Many species use swarm behavior for selective survival. We see it with ants or bacteria swarming around a food source and birds flocking for migration.

While humans have no biological system for swarm behavior, we consistently ‘swarm-ball’ around novel concepts. Swarm-balling leads to incredible discoveries, but — when done enmasse — opens us up to inattentive blindness; our failure to notice anything else because our attention is too engaged. As the swarm-ball grows around a single concept, so does collective inattentive blindness — they are symmetrical. While the costs of under responding to the novel coronavirus dominate media coverage, the costs of over responding, or swarmballing, have been minimally considered.

Where have we seen a swarm-ball occur?

The Swarmball Effect

Everyone remembers September 11, 2001. An event lasting a few moments that shaped laws, institutions, narratives, budgets — virtually every aspect of society. Trillions were spent to reshape institutions, homeland and international security, and travel. When the global superpower and world’s biggest economy makes such a big move, the world necessarily follows. The results was a global reshaping, or swarmball, around terrorism, both directly through defense cooperation or indirectly through security compliance.

What did the swarm-ball look like?

First, the bulk of the global economy, through its own actions (reactions), forced the rest of the world to conform to a uniform and expensive shift in security policy. If you wanted a plane to land in the US, you had to meet US security standards — the fact of this relationship didn’t change, but the standards did. These were now elevated, expansive, actively being added to, and expensive. The rest of the world was expected to comply. If they didn’t, they were locked out of the world’s biggest economy. The costs of not complying were naturally worse, but they were costs all the same. Costs we still live with.

Second, the bulk of global defense institutions and their governments drove significant resources towards fighting terrorism. Whenever this happens (a new budget line item that is massive, growing, with large discretionary applications, and is not subject to effective political opposition), everyone notices and reconfigures their attention to get a piece of the pie-in-vogue. This created a generation of experts, billions in grant funding, operational expertise, production standards, and more, around a single topic — terrorism.

Suppose terrorism were solved. What would we do with the thousands of contracting firms, billions in investment, and hundreds of thousands of jobs created through combatting terrorism? Or suppose some new threat emerged that this generation of experts was ill equipped to address. Or what if all the investment and expertise we threw at the problem actually did more harm than good (because this historically never happens)?

All industries are life forms. They want to keep living. When circumstances change (and they always do), the old regime is often found wanting, and becomes like an enemy, or an autoimmune response, to the needs of the new system in the new circumstances. The story of Pandora’s box warns us about this but we have an unfortunate habit of repeating generational mistakes. Speaking of repeating generational mistakes — COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic swarm-ball

The infectious disease community has collectively swarm-balled around the COVID-19 pandemic. We have seen an unprecedented rise of peer-reviewed research around a single concept. As a result, we have learned a great deal about things such as disease transmission dynamics, the effectiveness of non-therapeutic interventions (social distancing, mask wearing, etc.), and the benefits of mass diagnostic testing; all are amazing discoveries. But, it begs the question — what have we overlooked since the COVID-19 pandemic began?

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

If a different disease causes an outbreak that we failed to detect or investigate, did the outbreak occur? The answer is obvious, but swarm-balling around COVID-19 may cause many additional outbreaks to go unnoticed. In the United States, infectious disease outbreaks are typically detected using routine surveillance or following up on community inquiries made to public health authorities. Our inevitable but understandable swarm-ball around the pandemic has synergized with initial funding constraints and limited personnel; leading to the universal expansion of responsibility to combat the pandemic. This expansion of responsibility opens us to inattentive blindness and prevents other infectious diseases from receiving the attention required to minimize their impact on the population. Inattentive blindness becomes a greater issue when we consider the value of virus hunting.

Virus hunters track down mutating viruses around the globe (also applicable to other pathogen types). The intent is to identify, understand, and prevent them from ever approaching the scope of a pandemic. Virus hunting helps minimize inattentive blindness by allowing us to widen our focus to encompass different infectious diseases. Unfortunately, swarm-balling around the COVID-19 pandemic brought global virus hunting to a halt, preventing our ability to monitor other deadly pathogens.

In closing

It is essential that we combat the COVID-19 pandemic, but not at the cost of our capacity to prevent other infectious disease outbreaks. Just as it was essential for us to combat terrorism, but not if we fail to recognize the emergence of new threats. The more we swarm-ball, the more we risk allowing something worse to slip through our inattentive blindness. Public health authorities must continue to monitor and investigate other infectious diseases while virus hunters must continue their efforts to prevent other pathogens from approaching the level of COVID-19. Otherwise, something far worse will appear in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.