Exhausted from Social-ing… A lot.

I’m sure weekends like this used to be pretty normal… in the before times. But I’m out of practice, and I’m totally knackered.

Dawnise found-out on Facebook post that a neighbor of ours from Seattle was moving to London. She arrived (and made the aforementioned Facebook post) earlier this week. She got settled into temp housing, got a clear COVID test, and we had her around for Saturday brunch. I made brioche french toast and we sat and caught up for a couple hours. It was fantastic.

Saturday night we caught the DLR to a “do-over” birthday party for a friend, at a gastro pub in east London, along the Thames. They had arranged a room – food, drinks, and more people than we’d been in one place with in quite a while. At some point, somehow, Dawnise and another extroverted friend ended up chatting with a group of very well dressed folks who turned out to be quite interesting. Two were musicians, one in media, and the last a bit of a serial entrepreneur.

This morning we got up, made breakfast, and caught an early afternoon train to Guildford, to meet up with friends and former colleagues we haven’t seen in far too long. We spent the afternoon chatting, eating and drinking with friends with better weather than we had any right to hope for. We got a ride back to the station, fortuitously arrived just in time to catch an express train back to London, and got home just on time to feed and medicate the diabetic cat.

Tomorrow we’ve got tickets for a play we were scheduled to see just before the theaters were closed, with friends who’ve since moved back to the US.

Put a fork in me. I’m done.

But also, more of this, please-and-thank-you.

A Path Not Taken

Occasionally, life nudges you to look over your shoulder, and wonder about what might have been.

I finished reading This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, by Nicole Perlroth. It made me look back at a moment when the choices I made left clearly visible ripples in the pond.

In 2002 I was working for a startup that was running out of runway. I was asked to stick around and wrap things up, as much as they could be, but knew before long I’d be looking for “the next thing.” I started talking to companies in the Los Angeles area, and had a couple prospects.

I chatted with a company then called Overture, formerly known as GoTo.com, that pioneered the pay-for-placement search model. A few years later they would be acquired for billions-with-a-b dollars by Yahoo!, but I didn’t join them. So the story doesn’t go there.

One afternoon I headed out to UC Riverside, where I’d done my undergraduate degree, to say hi to some of the faculty I stayed in touch with, and have lunch. That conversation set the wheels in motion for me to return to UCR, work on a DARPA funded research project, and get my Masters degree. It also meant I got to kick the job hunt down the road by a couple years, which was fine with me. This was set against the backdrop of the “1st dot com bubble burst,” and while I was fortunate to have options, none of them were particularly compelling.

Over the next two years I met some fantastic folks, learned a bunch about topics that were new to me, taught a couple classes, got my first experience leading and mentoring people in an academic setting, publish a few papers, and even managed to build a system, write a thesis and defend it. Not bad, really.

For part of that time I’d been flying up to Seattle, at the invitation of a friend and repeat colleague to consult.

All good things come to an end, and I once again had to turn my attention to “the next thing.” Over a few months, I would interview with Amazon (didn’t join them, but that decision would turn out not to stick), was asked to turn my consulting role into a full time role in Seattle, and got connected through former colleagues to a little “cyber security” company called @Stake. I had worked at the same company as some of the principals before that ill-fated startup, and that was enough to get a phone interview, which turned into an on-site interview, and looked to be on track for an offer.

In 2004 the “cyber security” landscape was very different. Microsoft was investing heavily in improving security, catalyzed by Bill Gates’ annual memo in 2002. Break-ins at large companies that leaked sensitive data weren’t yet commonplace. The world hadn’t yet seen a nation-state weaponize software to attack physical infrastructure. That sort of plot was reserved for Tom Clancy novels, and bandied about by us tin-foil hat types. And Snowden hadn’t yet shown the tin foil hat types that there were threats in heaven and earth even they hadn’t dream’t of.

And in this “left-of-boom” moment I was seriously considering joining a software security firm. Helping customers defend their networks from bad guys and… well, who knows what else.

But that’s not what happened.

@Stake, it turned out, had started doing a bunch of work with Microsoft. Their offer was for me to move to Seattle and they expected a bunch of travel. I had two other offers to move to Seattle, and neither of them involved much travel, which seemed preferable when uprooting your spouse and moving to an unfamiliar place. When I said thanks-but-no-thanks to @Stake they didn’t push back on my summary of “moving plus heavy travel sounds like a great recipe for divorce.”

We did end up moving to Seattle. I turned the consulting gig into full time for a few years. I worked on music and media streaming, not keeping bad guys out of networks.

Perlroth’s book gave me a peak into the world I nearly joined. I’ve had a few brushes with that world over the course of my career. And there were moments in the book that resonated sharply.

Being on the defending side when a bad guy was actively trying to do things they shouldn’t. Working with a wicked smart group of colleagues to clean up a mess when defense succumbed to attack. Spending a few weeks in a windowless room, following the digital footsteps of a sneaky intruder to reconstruct a timeline of events. Finding digital fingerprints that led a colleague back to the intruders name, and address, and photograph. Sharing a look of shock when a coincidental power outage during an event made us all wonder if we were in well over our heads. Laughing when we realized that power outage had inadvertently neutered an otherwise persistent threat. Working closely with security professionals in private practice and in US federal law enforcement. Seeing the look of confusion when my wife said there was a call for me from the FBI one Sunday afternoon.

I’m not sure I’d call them “fun” times. But they were memorable.

At several points in the book, and while reading the closing chapter this morning, I found myself intensely curious about what might have been.

How life might have turned out had I made different choices.

That’s a Name I’ve Not Heard in a Long Time…

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but it turns out you can decide to read one based appearance alone. Which is how, despite having no idea who Flint Dille was, I found myself reading his biographic.

It was all about the cover. And the title maybe might have helped.

How do you pass on a book called The Gamesmaster: My Life in the ’80s Geek Culture Trenches with G.I. Joe, Dungeons & Dragons, and The Transformers?

To be clear, I like transforming robots as much as the next male geek growing up in the 80’s, but it was the Dungeons & Dragons bit that sealed the deal.

My first foray online was via a 1200 baud modem (or maybe it was 300 baud, I forget) and an Apple ][+. The computer and modem had been handed down by my uncle, when he upgraded to an Apple //e.

I started calling BBSs from the listings in the back of the free computer magazines that had started appearing at the local public library. I learned that the ones with lots of phone lines – that didn’t just buzz busy all the time – generally charged for access. I learned that lots of them had basically the same games, and that just because a number was in my area code didn’t mean it was free to call.

This last bit turned out to be really important for a kid with no source of income.

One day I saw a listing with a promising name:

The Belching Dragon Inn & Tavern

You can’t judge a BBS by its name any more than a book by its cover, but this name had my attention. Having learned about “local toll calls,” my first move was to flip open the phone book to the list of local exchanges. As luck would have it, it was a free call from my parents house. I dialed in, and ended up “finding my people.”

These days finding like minded people on-line is basically a given. Doesn’t matter what esoteric interest you’re trying to match, there’s a community out there. Not so much in the 80’s. Finding a group of people who were also into pen-and-paper Role Playing Games, Computers, fantasy and science fiction… It was pretty incredible.

I had no idea, when the system asked me to choose a “nom de modem,” that my choice would still be with me over two decades later. Or that many of the people I connected with – first as glowing green characters on my monochrome display, and later in face-to-face living color – would leave such a lasting mark on my life.

By the late 90’s the BBS had succumbed to the siren song of the Internet. Connections and conversations shifted to email lists, then to Facebook. I could say that shuttering my Facebook account made me lose touch, but in reality the threads connecting the group had frayed before that. Most threads just wore thin. Some were snapped, cut, and occasionally set alight.

Communities are more than the net of the relationships of the people in them – but those relationships are key, and relationships can be fragile.

At any rate, just as I couldn’t pass up a book called The Gamesmaster, it turned out I couldn’t read it without thinking about those times, and about those people.

It nudged me into reaching out to a few folks I haven’t spoken to in too long. And when I was writing a message – tapping someone on the shoulder from half a world away – I realized I should probably use the name they knew me by best.

And that’s the titular name I’ve not heard in a long time.

One of my own.

Losing the Thread

Dawnise took a big step this evening, and got rush tickets to a production at The Barbican. So the cats and I are hanging out at home and I have music on louder than I might otherwise.

Amos Lee came up in the shuffle. I remembered seeing him at Royal Festival Hall, and sat trying to figure out when that was. Did we live here yet? Did we know we would be living here? Were we living in Luxembourg?

I know I did it, but I can’t remember when. A memory adrift in a fog.

That sorta sums up the last couple years for me. How ’bout you?

Life’s Uncertain, Eat Desert [sic] First

My mom attributes part of my frankly shockingly bad spelling to the trend, when I was young, of teaching phonetic spelling. I was given a bunch of letters, the sounds they made, and asked to spell a word. I picked the way that looked the best.

“Hook’d on fonix werkd for me.”

So when Dawnise and I were getting invitations printed for our wedding dessert reception, there was basically no way I was going to notice that what they actually said was desert – as in the hot places with no water and a bunch of sand.

By the time the error was discovered all we could do was lean into it and put some cacti on the table with the sweets.

It was not, in the grand scheme of things, a particularly big deal.

The same can’t be said for today (15-Aug) in 1999. Dawnise was recovering from some foot surgery, and that morning she didn’t feel right. Fast forward to the afternoon, and despite her objections and insistence she was fine we were in the car headed to urgent care, where they examined her and immediately sent us across the road to the emergency room.

If you’ve never seen the ER jump in to action the way it does in the movies, try coming in with a young woman in a wheel chair presenting with chest pains and shortness of breath, sent over by the urgent care across the street. I was just along for the ride – staying out of the way and, in an age before ubiquitous smart phones, trying to glean what information I could from what I was overhearing.

The answer, for those playing along from home, turned out to be a pulmonary embolism – and the no energy was because her O2 levels were through the floor due to a partial lung collapse.

She was started on oxygen, heparin and admitted to the ICU, where she would stay for the better part of a week.

I called work – a now-defunct e-commerce software company outside Boston where I worked in professional services – and told them that I’d be unreachable for “a while.”

I don’t remember many details from that week. I bounced between home and the hospital. I figured out what a “pulmonary embolism” was – and how serious, and I slept in a hospital chair a fair bit.

She slowly got to the point where she could take a breath. Then she learned to hate her lung capacity exercises. And she learned to love-and-hate it when friends visited and made her laugh (thanks, Brad!).

A week later she was discharged, still on heparin – which brought changes in diet (no leafy greens), a propensity for easy bruising, and a call for extra care when doing anything that might make her bleed.

Today the episode is mostly just a memory – save when I remind her that historically she is not to be trusted in saying she needn’t seek medical attention.

But every year, around now, that memory serves as a powerful reminder that life really is uncertain – it encourages reflection, and sometimes change.

This year, and last, it’s hard to say we’re doing “what we want to do” – and I realize that as “these uncertain times” stretch off toward the horizon, this is one of the memories that brings home for me the weight of the passage of time.

The pandemic, and the changes and restrictions it brings aren’t really in our control. They’re not our fault. But that doesn’t stop them from being our problem.

Eat desert – or dessert, if you like sweets more than sand – first. Tomorrow is a terrible time to do anything important.

This Is Going to Hurt Me More…

After two weeks of insulin, Oscar had a follow-up to check his fructosamine levels. The good news was that the levels had fallen several hundred points, into a range the vet considers “healthy.” He’d also lost a bit of weight, at a rate the vet also considered healthy. Barring acute events or observable change in behavior, he’ll goes back in three months to test again.

So the 7am/7pm feeding and injection regime is “the new normal.”

Cats, it turns out, are much better at knowing when they’re hungry than they are at knowing what time it is – so Ivan generally starts demanding food a couple hours before it’s time to be fed.

That’s far less irritating in the afternoon than it is at 5:30 in the morning.

Dawnise is really good at ignoring him and either sleeping through it or falling back to sleep. I, on the other hand, am not. And the cats figured out long ago that a pretty sure fire way to get my attention (and get me out of bed) is to make destructive sounding noises in a room just out of sight.

So, yeah… Three weeks in and it’s already getting old.

In other news, the UK’s third COVID wave seems to have peaked at 60k daily reported cases (a ~12% positivity rate in England) in mid July. So far much lower than the estimates – some as high as 100k per day.

The latest eyebrow-raising news is that the NHS has only recently started gathering and reporting data that differentiates people being admitted to hospital with COVID from those being admitted to hospital due to COVID.

That data shows that over the past month about 1 in 4 admissions are of people who test positive, but for whom COVID symptoms are not the cause of admission.

Hospitals were measuring and reporting what they were asked to measure and report. And from the perspective of a hospital, counting patients with COVID is reasonable and important. COVID infected patients demand more resources, in the form of increased isolation, PPE, etc., than non-COVID infected patients. So whether a patient arrives with a broken leg and tests positive, or comes in with low blood oxygen clearly due to COVID, that patient places more demands on the hospital. Knowing how many patients are admitted with COVID is a key data point for understanding the capacity of the health care system.

But health care system capacity wasn’t the only way the data was being interpreted by the media, the public, and seemingly by the government. As the vaccination program suppressed the link between infection and acute illness, public attention turned from case counts to more focus on hospitalization and mortality rates. And this reveals that recently, the hospitalization numbers haven’t quite represented what people thought they did.

The data being gathered told how many people were in hospital with COVID – and using that data to reason about the risk of being hospitalized due to COVID isn’t straight forward, indeed may be impossible.

But it was happening all the same.

Why is this data only being gathered now? I have seen no good answers. The Telegraph quotes Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, as saying: “This data is incredibly important, and this is information we should have had a very long time ago. We have been crying out for it for nearly 18 months.” (emphasis added) Going on to say “the Government might have made very different decisions about restrictions if it had access to data which actually measured the situation accurately.”

Were the decisions wrong? Hard to say. But making decisions that affect many millions of lives based on data that doesn’t mean what you think it means certainly seems … not great.

It’s also hard to say if the difference between what we were measuring and what people thought we were measuring has been consistent over time. It’s tempting to naively retroactively apply the 25% “over estimation” to hospitalization numbers from January – indeed that same article quotes Heneghan as saying “at the peak of the pandemic in January, we were talking about close to 40,000 patients in hospital – this new data suggests that back then around 10,000 of them were primarily there for other reasons” – but that’s almost certainly wrong. Nothing else about this virus has been stable over time, this seems unlikely to be the exception.

To be clear, I am not a statistician – I don’t even play one on television – clearly neither is Boris Johnson, and based on the quote above I have my doubts about Professor Heneghan, too. Having said that, I’m pretty sure a better past estimate could be had using long term hospital admissions data. Fortunately, that data exists, hopefully someone’s working on that as I type.

It takes context and understanding to turn “data” into “information,” and again to turn “information” into “knowledge.” Decision making, certainly on a national scale, demands rigor at each step.

If there’s a moral here, I think it lies somewhere between “lies, damn lies, and statistics” and “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

And there’s certainly been no shortage of that.

My Elephant Votes “No”

A few weeks back, Dawnise got us tickets for tonight’s taping of Comedians Giving Lectures. Despite enjoying the host (Sara Pascoe) and the format, and really wanting to take steps back toward normal, we’ve decided to sit this one out.

We got an email this morning with updated tickets; “please use this updated ticket rather than the previous version.” it said, along with a note that “there have been two changes to the ticket; the social distancing statement has changed and the PPE statement has changed.”

Well, then, guess it’s time to re-read the fine print.

In line with the dropping of legal restrictions on Monday, the producers and venue decided that “at this event, there will not be enforced social distancing.” and specifically noted that “each group will not be seated apart from each other group.”

We’re both vaccinated, so the risk to our health seems low. On the other hand, the news cycle has been dominated lately with articles about the so-called “pingdemic” (the British press loves naming things) – a surge of people being instructed to self-isolate by test-and-trace. With the daily case count averaging 48,000 new cases per day – about 80% of the peak level seen in January – the heretofore largely vestigial test-and-trace system has suddenly woken from its slumber to rain on the freedom parade.

I figure the chance that someone in a shoulder-to-shoulder, young-trending audience tests positive for covid in the next few days is approximately 100%.

So while we’re unlikely to get sick, and even less likely to get “seriously sick,” we figure there’s a pretty good chance we’ll get ping’d by test-and-trace and have to sequester ourselves in our flat for a week and a half.

The final nail in the coffin was learning that Dawnise couldn’t head over to get in the queue for the taping ahead of me, while I finished up a work meeting – their check-in protocol is to hand out numbered wristbands on arrival, and they were clear that people who didn’t arrive together wouldn’t sit together.

So we decided we’ll stay home, and watch the episode when it ultimately airs.

And while everything I’ve just written is true, and tells a pretty good story for why we’re (not) doing what we’re (not) doing – I think the reality is that my elephant leaned away, and I’m just explaining its behavior.

Things You Learn to Live With

A week from Monday, on the 19th of July, England plans to remove all remaining legal restrictions on behavior instituted due to COVID-19. No more limits on the size of indoor gatherings, no requirement to wear masks indoors, no more mandate for social distancing, and no more government guidance for those who can to work from home. Fully vaccinated travelers still need outbound and return PCR tests, but can skip quarantine on return from “amber list” countries.

People are being encouraged to ‘exercise judgement.’

Case counts are doubling roughly every 6 days.

The new health secretary; Sajid Javid, who replaced Matt Hancock when Hancock was observed “breaking social distancing rules,” says the UK must ‘learn to live with’ COVID. Maybe it’s me, but this isn’t the sort of statement I’d expect from someone charged with protecting public health when cases are growing this quickly.

Israel – where the majority of the population (56%) is fully vaccinated – has responded to their case count rising by reinstating a mask mandate, six months after having removed all restrictions.

So I give it a 7/10 chance that some set of restrictions are re-introduced before Christmas. I’d be happy to be wrong.

Also from the things-you-learn-to-live-with department, Dawnise and I find ourselves – for the second time – caring for a diabetic cat. We took Oscar to the local vet about two weeks ago, having noticed an uptick in his fluid consumption and, um, return.

They did an exam, drew blood, and found acutely elevated blood glucose leading them to suspect diabetes. A subsequent fructosamine panel reinforced the diagnosis. So he’s getting twice daily insulin injections, and both cats’ eating schedules have been strictly controlled – which I assure you no one in the house is particularly happy about.

He goes back in a week for follow-up blood work to adjust his daily dose.

If the idea of jabbing your cat with a hypodermic twice a day isn’t enough to get you irritated, consider that it also means you – or someone you trust to jab your cat with a hypodermic – needs to be home twice a day, on a pretty predictable schedule.

So that makes life in general, and travel particularly… complicated.

We had been starting to discuss a return visit to Seattle, once the quarantine-on-return requirement was dropped, and this throws a spanner in those works. We need to at least get him on a stable treatment plan before the two of us can consider vanishing at the same time.

Our hope – which may be pure optimism – is that we can get to the point where his condition can be controlled through diet. Unlike humans, cats with type 2 diabetes can experience spontaneous remission – we know, ’cause our last diabetic cat (Junior) “got better” after a period of diet control and treatment. Fingers crossed.

Not much other news of particular import – Dawnise is starting to occasionally venture out of the flat – shopping trips around London, solo and with friends. I’ve been fighting the good fight to remain engaged and motivated. Some days are better than others, but mostly I feel like I’ve long run out of fucks. Whatever I have now are to fucks what chicory is to coffee, or carob is to chocolate. Sorta similar looking, but you’d never mistake them for the real thing.

I guess this is what burnout feels like.

Another thing to add to the list of things I’d rather not to learn to live with.

Once more ’round the block

Tomorrow marks two years since our arrival in the UK. It seems both forever ago and only yesterday that it had been a year, and if we hadn’t moved flats in the middle of the blur, there would have been even less to mark the passage of time.

Our plan had been to live here for “a couple of years” – but our plan certainly hadn’t been to live here for “a couple of years almost entirely in our flat.” Our plan had included things like exploring London, traveling around the UK, and visiting places in Europe we didn’t get to while we lived in Luxembourg. The pandemic had other plans, and as it stretched toward the end of last year, we started talking about what we wanted to do, and if we could figure out how to do that.

We sorta decided that unless the pandemic situation in America got a bunch better, and got a bunch worse in the UK, moving back without doing any of the things we came to do felt like something we’d regret.

Moving internationally takes work. We haven’t found it to be as hard as people expect, but it certainly takes effort, and comes with its fair share of stress (especially if you’re moving animals). Oh, and it’s not exactly cheap.

The hardest bit is typically immigration – getting permission to live and work in a country you’re not a citizen of. Both times we’ve lived abroad my work visa has been sponsored by my employer.

The term of my agreement to come to the UK was two years – and while extending that agreement was possible, there was no guarantee. Around April of last year I’d moved out of the group that I was part of when we moved here, and for several reasons it wasn’t clear the group I had joined was going see enough value in me being here that extending my stay would make sense to them. If they weren’t supportive, I didn’t have too many options, and none of them seemed great.

So I started working on a “Plan B.”

I engaged a local immigration law firm, and with their help and with some graciously written letters of support from a few former colleagues, I was able to petition the UK government to decouple my immigration status from my employment.

It took a couple months, but by the end of last year, I had a Plan B – and more options.

With that in my back pocket, I had a frank and honest conversation with the leadership in my org, and we mutually agreed that there were probably places I could be more valuable than where I was. So I started chatting with other teams and moved into a new team (again) earlier this year. As it turned out, the new team was amenable to extend my assignment, so a little paperwork later and our new plan is to be in the UK through the middle of 2022.

In other news, we’re both fully vaccinated – and by this time next week we’ll both be +2 weeks from our second dose (“maxinated”). The government is making optimistic noises that the four week delay to eliminating the last legal restrictions will stick – and that July 17th, we’ll be back to normal. “This time for real.” I’m not sure the data I can see supports that optimism, but then Boris’ government hasn’t established a particularly good track record of ahead of time decision making.

Still, with any luck the next year won’t be like the last year. We’d like to do some traveling, get back to Seattle for a visit or two, and generally speaking not spend another twelve months in our flat.

Fingers crossed.

Trade-offs, Triggers and Least Regret

If I had to sum up the UK government’s pandemic response succinctly, I’d say “better late than never, but frustratingly late.”

The UK lagged Europe in implementing non-pharmaceutical interventions, stubbornly insisted Christmas wouldn’t be canceled – only to go back into lock-down days ahead of the holiday – and inexplicably waited weeks while case counts in India went vertical before restricting travel into the UK.

A few weeks ago, I wondered what, in a few weeks, we would we wish we had done “now” instead of waiting to do it later.

We had been chatting over lunch with friends about the early signs that the Delta variant (a.k.a. the-variant-formerly-known-as-Indian) was spreading exponentially, and what could and should be done about it.

“Their only choice is to extend lock-down, and they can’t or won’t” a friend argued. I disagreed – arguing there were other possible responses – re-targeting and accelerating the vaccination program, for example – shifting supplies to the areas affected and and opening vaccination to the younger age groups likely to be socializing and thereby spreading the virus.

I wasn’t privy to enough information to argue that was the right thing to do, just that it was a thing that could be done, and that if it were to be done, doing it now would be better than doing it later.

A few weeks later the government has announced that the June 21st target to eliminate remaining restrictions will be missed due to rising case counts and hospitalization. They’ve been “surge vaccinating” in hot spots, and as of yesterday (15 June) accelerated access to vaccinations for younger age groups and reduced the inter-dose delay from ~12 to ~8 weeks.

Again I couldn’t help but wonder why couldn’t we decide to take these steps a few weeks ago?

There are very few “right answers” in life – mostly we swim in an ocean of trade-offs. We try to make the best decisions we can, given the situation we’re in and the information we have. And we hope not to regret our decisions later.

Many of us struggle to think clearly and in advance about what change(s) would make us change our decision. My experience has been that by thinking through those triggers, and playing “what if” with a goal of minimizing regret we can often make “better” decisions. Or at least make decisions we’d make again, if the choice was ours to make again.

A simple way of thinking about minimizing regret is to ask yourself, when faced with a decision between alternatives, given everything you know now which choice do you think will cause you more regret over time? What could happen, or what could you learn, that would change your choice? How likely do you think you are you to learn that thing, or for any of the possible triggers you identified to happen? Is it possible to change your choice once you’ve made it? Is it possible to change if you made the other choice? Is one direction easier? Cheaper?

What we regret as individuals depends heavily on what we value. You and I, faced with the same decision – and both of us trying to minimize regret – may come to opposite conclusions. We might not agree, and it might not be obvious why we disagree. Still, if we’ve been successful, and not just self-delusional, if faced with making the decision again both of us would repeat our choice.

Consider the decisions that the government has been lambasted for delaying. Between the time a decision was made to do nothing (e.g. the decision that there would be no Christmas lock-down, or the decision not to impose restrictions on travel from India to the UK) and the time that decision was reversed, what was learned? What changed? At what point was that outcome certain, or predictable with high confidence?

High stakes decision making with incomplete and inaccurate information is hard, I mean really hard. There are no A/B tests – no way to know, or convince others, what would have happened if we made the other choice. What would have happened if we had turned right. This has real and significant implications. If we take action to avoid a disaster, and the disaster never materializes, there will be voices – sometimes loud ones – asserting that the disaster never would have happened regardless, and our actions were unnecessary and in some way harmful.

This sentiment has become a louder undertone in the media in the UK of late, seeming to increase in volume as delaying the removal of lock-down restrictions past the June target became more likely. Past modeling of disease and resulting hospitalization and death have been wrong – overshooting the observed reality, sometimes significantly. Restrictions on freedoms and trade have a cost – in money, in livelihoods, in opportunity. These costs are real.

When making a trade-off between predictable economic damage and likely increased illness and loss of life, and knowing what you know, how would you minimize regret?