Why Every Existing Approach to Covid-19 Reopening Is Wrong

Top-down approaches are doomed to costly failure

Courtesy the author.

As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve been under mandated lockdown for 48 days--longer than nearly any other community in America. So I’ve been following efforts to reopen the country during Covid-19 with intense interest. And I’ve concluded that nearly every approach so far is wrong.

Why? The existing approaches are all top-down. They focus on reopening sectors, regions, or even (in a move that is bound to lead to an incalculable waste of human life) entire states.

These approaches are wrong because they ignore the fundamental interconnections and network dynamics underlying modern societies. Here’s a real network map (graph) of a modern community; in this case the community of Canadian professional cyclists. Each node represents an individual. The lines represent connections between individuals.

Network map of Canadian professional cyclists. Courtesy Gordon Ross/Creative Commons

Here is another, denser map; in this case of climate change professionals in the Marshall Islands.