Notice

It was summer 2010, a hot Saturday afternoon, and after a sweaty morning in the garden, I settled down on the deck with my favorite beer and a smoked meat sandwich. Two bites and three sips, the opening riff at Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones has disturbed my peace.

Now I’m a Stones fan, but this “music” came from my neighbor’s garden, played by the 13-year-old son, who had received a guitar and amp for his birthday. Three hours of poorly played rock’n’roll on a detuned guitar, and I was nuts.

Economists call such incidents an externality. When my activity or behavior affects your production or consumption, it is an externality. The poorly played music that affected my quiet enjoyment on a summer afternoon is a trite example of a negative externality. Pollution is a more important example. The trees I plant on my urban property create benefits for the community beyond the shade I receive, thus creating a positive externality.

A central idea of ​​externalities is that personal costs and benefits underestimate social costs and benefits. In severe pandemics, this divergence is extreme. We often underestimate the social costs of our choices.

COVID-19 is the mother of all negative externalities. Once I am infected, anyone I approach is at risk of contracting the disease depending on how close, how long, contextually, and apparently how forcefully I speak. This is the nature of aerosol transmission. In other words, COVID-19 is an STD – a socially transmitted disease.

The ability of SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, to mutate and replicate presents a constant biological challenge; human behavior creates additional levels of risk and complexity for public policies. While many externalities are local – my neighbor’s noise decreases after about 100 meters – pandemic pathogens are global, requiring a concerted and coordinated attack.

We manage externalities in three ways. First, we can just accept the problem. In the case of my young neighbor’s excruciating play, luckily he soon realized that a rock star career was unlikely, and the guitar finally found its true calling at a garage sale. Sometimes doing nothing is the best policy.

COVID-19 has created a high death toll around the world with staggering economic losses, and the new variants threaten to prolong the agony, so doing nothing is not appropriate.

A second approach to managing externalities is through nuisance laws and regulations such as zoning. But the application is expensive, and those affected can endure years of inconvenience. COVID-19 is also more than a nuisance.

A third approach consists of incentive and penalty systems. Recent information from Prairie Research Associates shows that there is a role for education and advocacy among vaccine-hesitant groups. A history of bad experiences with the health care system has encouraged some to avoid vaccination. Financial support for community groups to promote immunization makes sense.

It is probably not enough. We’re a long way from collective immunity, and with the delta variant lurking in Manitoba, there is a risk that the current wave will not abate quickly. Current vaccines still offer significant immunity against new variants… until now. Driving vaccination rates to the 70 percent that epidemiologists say we need will likely require penalties for those who do not vaccinate.

Already in the United States, countless universities have required full vaccinations for all students and staff for the fall term. Here at the University of Manitoba, the fall semester will be partially face-to-face for smaller classes, but virtual for all larger semesters; I am reluctant to return to the classroom without a similar vaccine warrant. I have also become comfortable with delivering online courses and my students have seen many benefits from this approach.

The government may not need to impose vaccination for mass indoor events. I’m not ready to go back to a Jets game (leaving aside the recent dismal playoff experience against the Montreal Canadiens) and sit among unvaccinated jesters screaming at the top of their lungs, while spilling beer in my neck. We already accept the need to go through a metal detector to see a hockey game; showing a vaccination passport is trivial.

Organizers of indoor concerts, plays, and sporting events may find that their sales depend on assuring customers that all attendees have received a full immunization. Many will impose vaccine requirements uninvitedly. The role of governments would be to support the application of these measures by verifying the validity of documents and imposing penalties for the presentation of counterfeits.

We are not going back to normal. The nature of the pandemic, its high negative externalities, and the potential havoc wrought by the lambda variant (yet to emerge) compels us to accept new rules and responsibilities to create an acceptable facsimile of normal that is better than the current gloom. .

Gregory Mason is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba.