What if Coronavirus was visible?

There are two things that run this world: Feedback Loops and Incentives.

Action and reaction. When we do something, we get a result. Positive or negative. The results we get, might decide how we repeat or avoid the same action the next time. If we have an incentive, we might repeat the same action over and over again even if the results have been consistently negative. But also, if we have the right incentive, we might avoid harmful actions from the beginning.

In fact: The longer it takes us to see the consequence of our actions, the harder it is to avoid harmful actions.

Imagine that you are running an unmanned gym chain. You are selling yearly subscriptions to individuals to come and work out by themselves. What is the best case scenario for you financially? If you discouraged people from coming to your gym, ever, then you didn’t have to even clean the floors, let alone maintain the gym machines. Even if there is a negative outcome of your action (you are essentially robbing your customers of their money without giving a service.) That sounds like a solid one-year business plan. But there is a problem. If you actually discourage your customers from using the gym, you will eventually give them a pause at the end of their first year. Why should they renew their memberships?

In this case, your incentive (minimum maintenance cost) and the customer’s incentive (a fit body) are at odds. The typical feedback loop will take maybe a year to complete. At the end of this period, the misalignment between the incentives will become very obvious and the relationship will break.

The Coronavirus, as with all others of its kind, is invisible to the naked human eye. It takes a relatively long time for it to show itself to us and we observe its effects only after it is too late.

In the case of the global pandemic outbreak, a lot of people failed to take this threat seriously and some are still failing to protect themselves or others. The threat is invisible. It is nowhere to be seen. So, why bother? In some cases, the victims of the carelessness might not even draw the conclusion between their actions and their suffering. As in: “I don’t know why all of my customers cancelled their gym membership after their first year!”

You can generalize this problem to so many things including sustainability. Imagine that you had to run over a polar bear cub every time you drove your car. Would you still? The action and reaction seem so far removed from each other that we seem to have a hard time tying them together.

Why does anyone go to see a doctor when they have a suspicious mole or why does anyone go to a repair service when the car engine makes weird noises? These are scary indicators of a bleak and possibly painful future, therefore they get our full attention. This new invisible threat is not something that we have seen before. Therefore it is not very alarming as a mole or a car backfire. That’s probably why someone with a “little bit of sniffles” can still go into a crowded bar and mingle even it is the equivalent of setting that bar on fire — except the patrons will start burning a week later.

So, what if the new Coronavirus was simply a visible phenomenon that we could detect with our naked eyes and avoid at all costs? Unsurprisingly, the solution possibly lies in this question.

Right now, many governments and corporations are trying to find a solution to do just that — make Coronavirus visible. Through more rigorous and frequent testing, digital solutions that alert us when the virus is in our proximity or tracking systems for monitoring crowd movements of whole societies.

I believe that the longer feedback loop we can foresee, the better survival chances our civilization has. This goes much beyond an isolated virus.

I am hopeful. I am hopeful that we will eventually find a more permanent solution to this disease but until then, we’re going to have to keep trying to shorten the feedback loop of this invisible threat. And make it as visible as we can. Until then, let’s all imagine that the threat is visible and keep a healthy distance.