The Tragedy of the Commons and the coronavirus pandemic

The Tragedy of the Commons and the coronavirus pandemic

21, March 2020.

Dear fellow human being. The best of the worlds now, from the point of view of each person individually, is that everybody stays at home, and only you keep going out enjoying public spaces as usual. In this case, you will be protected from the contagion from the virus and at the same time will not pay the costs of being confined at home. The problem is that if everybody thinks like that, the contagion of the virus will spread too fast and it may be a disaster to many people, maybe including you, someone from your family or group of friends.

Common Pool Resources (CPR) are resources that people have collective rights and/or abilities to use, and whose value is depleted by each individual’s use (See “The Challenge of Common-Pool Resources” by Ostrom). Directly, the CPR in the present pandemic are the public spaces (streets, squares, beaches). Indirectly, the CPR are the health services (hospital beds and equipment, nurses and doctors time and expertise, medications). The value of the public spaces and of the health services is depleted if most individuals keep going out and physically encountering other people. This is so because this behaviour (going out and physically meeting other people) increases the spread of the new coronavirus.

The catch (or the paradox) is the following (see “Sick Individuals and Sick Populations” by Geoffrey Rose): the individual risk of the coronavirus for each person individually is small, but a small risk spread all over the population may give rise to so many cases that our health services (the indirect Common Pool Resource) may not be able to manage.

Ideally, in this pandemic we should adopt a “high-risk strategy” (as in Geoffrey Rose). In this strategy all the population (especially people who showed no or only mild symptoms) is tested and only those who carry the virus are physically isolated. However, there are not enough tests for all populations. So, in most countries we must apply the “whole population strategy” (as in Geoffrey Rose). In this strategy everybody is physically isolated, regardless of the knowledge whether you are or not a carrier of the virus.

The message is an optimistic one (from the point of view of each person individually):

1- The probability of you being infected by this virus is not yet known but may be relatively high. This will probably occur sooner or later in this or in the next years;

2- The probability of you perceiving that you have been infected is probably low. In this case it is going to be as if you have not been infected;

3- The probability that you will experience severe symptoms due to this coronavirus is probably low;

4- The probability that you will need hospital care due to this coronavirus is probably low;

5- The probability that you will die due to this coronavirus is probably low.

From the point of view of the necessary “whole populational strategy”, the message is more uncertain, but we will probably succeed:

1- As many people sense intuitively (probably correctly) that the risk for themselves individually is low, they don´t feel inclined to change their behaviour (especially healthy people who show no symptoms of this virus);

2- Authorities, instead of trying to scare people insisting that they need to protect themselves to reduce their own risks (which is true but the reduction in risk is so small that the message is potentially ineffective and “nearly not true”), should appeal to their altruistic inclinations, making clear that they will not reduce their individual risk significantly, but will preserve the health services´ resources necessary to treat the minority of the population who desperately needs medical attention (for any reason, not only the new coronavirus);

3- There are known precedents for altruistic behaviour related to health. For example, there are systems of blood donations that are successful and solely based on altruism – people donate to unknown unrelated people obtaining no material reward just the psychological pleasure of doing good (inserting a needle and pulling blood is more uncomfortable and riskier than not doing so, despite the risk being very small);

4- However, most people do not donate blood, and the trouble with a pandemic is that minority compliance won't be enough. Maybe, selfishly, the appeal more likely to be effective rests on the fact that people don't want to see their health services overwhelmed as you never know when you might need medical care and there had better be available doctors, hospital beds, etc.;

5- And finally, there is the extreme alternative of authorities forcing people to stay at home with the help of sanctions and the police (and, arguably, this seems to have worked in Wuhan).

In summary:

We have at our disposal some ways to attempt to protect our main Common Pool Resource being threatened by this pandemic at this moment, i.e., our health services. I hope that we choose the less traumatic ways of doing so and slowly return, collectively, to our public spaces and physical contact with our fellow human beings, without depleting our health services. At the same time, we must avoid physical isolation to extend for too long, keeping it to the strictly necessary, so that we end up depleting other valuable Common Pool Resources that results from the paralysis in economic and social activities. This is clearly a difficult balance to strike at this moment and it must be evaluated and adjusted on a day to day basis. The incremental return to normal life of those who are already immunized, i.e., those who were infected, cured and now carry this virus´ antibodies but not the virus, may be a first step.

I thank Martin Daly for his feedback and suggestions on a first version of this text.

Paulo Nadanovsky

Epidemiologist at Fiocruz and at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.

@Nadanovsky (Twiter); paulo.nadanovsky@gmail.com (E-mail).