This BBC radio doc on Covid from January 23rd is a fascinating historical artefact. All the seeds of Spring 2020 assumptions are there https://twitter.com/surplustakes/status/1344564863771795456?s=19

> Academics advising Labour gov during SARS unanimous that border closures / country travel bans don't work, economic disruption should be avoided
> By the time you close the border, the disease is already here so no point

> Pre-realignment politics of epidemics: during SARS Alan Johnson accepted scientific view was not to close border, but feared looking complacent in the right wing press, especially the Daily Mail, whose readers would be in favour of strong measures to keep out diseases

> on China's then newly-announced quarantine measures: 'impressive' but experts would expect riots if anyone else tried to do the same, which would be counter productive because the rioters would infect each other (cites quarantine riots in Ebola outbreak in West Africa)

> Only in China would people comply

> Prof John Oxford: China is "exceptional"... "helping the world by having one child, what a contribution they have made!" Their quarantine intervention was "breathtaking"

> Aaronovitch: "could we [UK] quarantine a city?"
"no"

Trying to piece together why public health / epidemiology people were so convinced that Western people would riot their way into mass death when a disease broke out (also curious about China 'helping the world' through coercive population control, all seems a bit distasteful)

The epi worldview seems to have been informed by

> ebola quarantine riots
> people didn't do much to avoid swine flu
> Maybe because they deal with STD outbreaks and wrongly thought the chaotic lives of serial VD clinic patients were representative of the general public

I was sceptical about this for nearly a whole year but it really does look like the "follow the science" plan to cause or allow the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people when the virus broke out was based on crappy social psychology / behavioural assumptions after all!