The Problem with Social Bubbling

[canyonwalker]

Not long after Coronavirus became a global pandemic and everyone was told to practice social distancing a compromise was suggested that would allow some in-person contact with others: Bubbling. The idea was you could form a social bubble including, say, your family and another family.



If you have kids you know they want to play with their friends. To stop them you'd have to keep them in the house most of the time and establish fairly draconian rules for when they're outside. Plus, it's not just kids. We adults need human contact, too. Pretty much all of us have people we'd appreciate visiting— a neighbor, a few close friends, relatives who live nearby, etc. So, the idea went, why fight human nature when you could work with it but just put some commonsense rules around it. The idea was, as long as you know who you're bubbling with and keep the bubble tight, you're not significantly increasing your risk of exposure to COVID-19.

The problem with bubbling is that keeping the bubble tight is way easier said than done. I thought about this when I first saw the concept months ago. Suppose you decide to bubble with your next door neighbor. The kids can play and the adults can enjoy picnics together. But who else is in each family's bubble? If the kids go to school or daycare, they're in a bubble with all those other kids... and their families... and whoever else those families bubble with. And the adults in your bubble? What if one's an essential worker with lots of close contact in their job? What if you have a brother who lives nearby with his family and you go to visit them every few weeks? What if your brother or his spouse is lax about masks and social distancing?



In short the problem with making a bubble is that it's pretty much never going to be a small bubble. You may think it's small, and as a simple concept it certainly starts small, but by the time you finish connecting overlapping circles of who interacts with whom, it's huge. And worse, it includes a lot of people you don't know and/or can't trust to behave responsibly in your bubble.

Comments

[kjn]

I think the problem with bubbles lies in that they shape thought towards a binary thinking—contact or no contact—rather than keeping contacts as few and as short as possible. I think the mental goal of everyone should be of minimising the risk of spreading Covid rather than eliminating the risk of getting it.

[canyonwalker]

I agree the false simplicity of binary thinking is a major challenge. It stripes across just about everything involved in how people deal with Covid. It's a problem unto itself, though. Just because some poor choices people may make in social bubbling are examples of binary thinking does not mean the idea of social bubbling is itself an instance of binary thinking or is even uniquely prone to it. Binary thinking is a challenge to any solution you can construct.

Take your own terminology, "minimising the risk", for example. That shapes thoughts toward binary thinking. Laypeople understand minimizing to mean zero. "I want zero risk" is a common form of binary thinking. As an engineer I understand the concept of minimizing subject to constraints— though I'd have to surmise that's what you meant as you didn't actually say it. And I'll note that elaborating on what "subject to constraints" means would cause the average layperson's eyes to gloss over, as would even having a fulfilling discussion on what an acceptable level of risk is.

[kjn]

Ayup. And also knowing that lowering the risk of a group might very well increase the risk for someone.

Like the examination that I'm going to go to next week with 38 people that cannot be rescheduled or moved without a lot of hassle (including disruption of staffing for the local hospitals next summer). To minimise risks we do it in three rooms rather than two. Each room will be slightly safer (due to less people in it), but we will expose one other person to a higher risk (the additional exam assistant).

[canyonwalker]

My analysis of that situation is that as long as people are properly spaced out, wearing masks, and cleaning hands after touching shared surfaces, it's relatively safe. The choice between (a) two rooms of 20 people or (b) three rooms with 14 each seems fairly meaningless unless the spacing in A is too tight. Otherwise the incremental extra space in B provides scant value.

Far-and-away the biggest risk, though, is one not mentioned so far. How likely is it that anyone in the group is sick with Covid? You can't tell with a high degree of certainty that anyone is sick short of administering tests and isolating everyone until results are available. Generally speaking, that's infeasible. But you can gauge the risk by assessing habits: Has everyone taken reasonable precautions against infection in their daily lives the past 2 weeks? I would rather sit 2 hours in a room with 20 people who enter enclosed spaces only for essentials and always wear masks when they must be in them, than sit in the same room with just 2 people who routinely visit restaurants, bars, or friends' houses, taking off their masks to eat & drink & talk.

[kjn]

It might not change the risk of being infected noticably in case of exposure, but it reduces the number of potential infections, in case a single person turns out to be. Rather than exposing 20 people, 14 people are exposed. That's a rather big win to me.

[canyonwalker]

Yes, if one person in the group is ill, it's better they expose 13 other people in the room versus 19. But what's the chance that someone is ill? Your model ignores that factor. I get it, it's infeasible to determine with certainty. But it can overwhelm everything else in the equation. To ignore it just because it's not trivial to quantify, and instead fall back to heuristics like "Fewer people in each room, that's a big win", is a form of the fallacy of binary thinking.

Moreover, if your model rests on the assumption that one person is sick with Covid to prove its payoff matrix is a big win, really that proves the model is flawed. If it can be assumed that one person in the group is sick then you should identify that person and exclude them. Otherwise you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Iitanic.

[culfinriel]

This goes along with some conversations people had, oh, repeatedly since, like, last April or May, at least. That is, average persons do not do concepts like statistics, and logarithmic or exponential and it is easier to do yes/no binary than "relatively short and few" in their brains. Which could be addressed constructively, but ...

Now, if we had had proper leadership and clear, consistent guidelines from the top to start with, none of that might have mattered. But our leadership, at least, still says there's nothing to see, here, so people are overwhelmed with babble. Much of it garbage and lies and bizarre delusions. And at this point even some otherwise reasonable people are just done. Too much noise, shut up, do not want to hear any more.

So I haz a sad that really a lot of people are trying and feel like the goal posts keep getting moved on them and it is absolutely fair to be exhausted and kind of give up. Even though I wish they would not give up. But I get it.

[canyonwalker]

There have been some clever and helpful guidelines along the way, such as charts I saw back in April-ish outlining which types of social activities were more dangerous or less dangerous than others. The problem is the power-hungry have seized on chaos as a tool of war. They flood the channel with endless shit. After a while ordinary people don't know who or what to believe anymore, and even smart, dedicated people get so tired of fighting it they stand down.